


Mattapsh yoteg

by Moniquill



Category: Original Work
Genre: M/M, Multi, Navel-gazing exploration of utopia, Other, Person from Dystopia meet Person from Utopia, Recreational Drug Use, They will eventually kiss kiss fall in love, This fic will eventually be explicit but today is not that day, nongraphic, talk of past abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:55:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 22,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26279035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moniquill/pseuds/Moniquill
Summary: Indigenous man engages in S-tier gardening in space. Adopts an alien sheepdog. Is surprised.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 6





	1. Gray

**Author's Note:**

> I literally have no idea what I'm doing, but here it is. I wanted to write about my fully automated solarpunk luxury gay space anarcho-socialism because the world is presently quite miserable and I want nice things.
> 
> Mattapsh yoteg means 'Sit by the fire (with me/us)' in Narragansett.

“So the answer is basically ‘too many of the wrong kind of soil-dwelling worms’,” I explained, walking the director of Life Systems through my report. “The kind of biome you’re trying to sustain here wants a deep layer of decomposing detritus to slowly release nutrients into the soil in a top-down fashion. Worms consume the layer and redistribute the nutrients across layers of soil. You’ve fundamentally got a ‘thinning understory’ problem.”

“Your suggestion for remediation, Human Jennings?” the director asked, the patches of chromatophores beneath her main eyes making rippling bands of blue-gray and white, something I’d come to take as analogous to a frown. It could be hard to tell, with tevsa, what facial expressions meant. 

“A targeted virus to remove Lumbricidae worms, and the introduction of Megascolecidae and Sparganophilidae worms,” I said. “And an investigation as to the source of the Lumbricidae. If you’ve got a tainted input, they’ll eventually become resistant to whatever targeted virus we apply and we’ll have to begin again.”

“I don’t perceive the way non-native worms could have been introduced,” the director said.

“If you sourced your starting culture from Earth, it might already have been contaminated. These worms were a huge problem in North America from the seventeenth through twenty-first centuries CE, and eradication efforts have been spotty at best. They’re beneficial to rotational crop agriculture, so people willfully reintroduce them. If you don’t have a total ban on live plant material to the station, I’d suggest implementing one. Any crops you plan to grow should come in as seeds or tissue cultures in sterile agar.”

“On behalf of the directorate, I’d like to thank you very much for your work thus far,” the director said. “Is there anything that you need to continue your work that’s not immediately available to you?”

“Not that I can think of at the moment, no,” I said. “You’ve been very accommodating.”

“We look forward to a continued working relationship with you, Human Jennings,” she said. “I will forward your report to the science and engineering teams, along with your proposal for remediation.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Is there anything further that you wish to talk about?”   


“There is not, our business is concluded with satisfaction. As it is said by humans, have a good day.”

“You as well,” I replied with a perfunctory smile.

It was several uncomfortable seconds of her staring at me before she turned and left. I’d probably failed to do something socially correct about ending a meeting.

I flipped my translator's output from Tevsa-sang to Adri’il as I made my way to the hub, because Adri’il had somehow become the most common shared language on the station despite Tevsa being the racial majority. The translator I was using had been programmed with Adri’il in mind, so it tended to have fewer hangups. 

Orbital Station Tsaǂbenkt was a diverse and colorful community, supporting what amounted to a university. Just now, it was a focused program for students and professors focused on the planet we were orbiting. Technically called Thuǂnya 613, but called ‘dirtside’ by pretty much all the humans. We had between two and three hundred humans living on the station at any given time, mostly situated in quarters directly adjacent to the earth-type biosphere I’d been brought on to assess and maintain. We were distinctly in the minority, and I was a minority among the minority as the only resident originating from Mishánnock Station. My being from there was almost certainly the qualification that’d gotten me this position, much more than my degree in permaculture and self-sustaining systems from New Shores university. Station Commander Brik͡ǂcha had sent me a letter of inquiry a couple of weeks after graduation. The post had been empty for a few years before I took it, and it showed.

I blacked out my goggles as I passed through the UV airlocks, then cleared them as I walked into the hub. I passed a group of youngish adri in the corridor on the way to the commerce section who looked either excited or nervous. They were talking quietly amongst themselves, giving me a wide berth, pretending not to stare. Probably new students; probably hadn’t spent any meaningful time among humans. Adri were an order of magnitude smaller than humans; they tended to stand between knee and waist high on me. I’d never met a tevsa who stood taller than my sternum. In this chunk of the rim, humans were generally regarded about like Griken were in Terran sectors - imposing muscle beasts. Being from a Death World only added to the mystique, really. 

The majority of the station’s population were Tevsa and Adri. They each had separate biospheres, like humans did. Everyone else stayed in quarters off the hub. 

I texted Vherka to let her know I was on my way, and she texted me about her specific location. I found her leaning against one of the support columns in commerce, playing some game or other on her tablet. Vherka was one of a handful of Griken who lived on Tsaǂbenkt. She’d cozied up to me as soon as I was settled in, because I could score her chinquapin nuts from the food forest. 

She commandeered a table without much effort while I hopped in line. When the deathworlders decided to sit together in the cafeteria, no one messed with us. I got us a pot of black coffee with nutmeg and cardamom, saying hi to Zhane on my way. 

“How goes?” I asked, sitting down and pouring myself a cup.

“Same as same is,” she said, ruffling her crest. She reached for the pot after I’d put it down. “We’ve got a ship docked from Nexir-ya, a bunch of temp merchants in the commons. There’s a syndicate that says they’re selling salvage, but I’m pretty sure it’s some pirates, yeah? You want to take some looks with me?”

“I don’t have anything particularly planned for the afternoon,” I said, rolling the idea over in my mind. “Yeah, let’s go. After coffee.”

“After coffee,” Vherka agreed


	2. Vösh

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We hear from Vösh, who is having a bad day.

Well, this was the deepest shit I’d ever been in. 

Part of it hadn’t even been my fault, really. No way of knowing the ship would be overtaken by pirates. Just dumb fucking luck that I’d been hiding out in the livestock area; the pirates thought I was an animal. Given that they’d painted the walls with everyone they’d identified as a person, I had no particular desire to correct their assessment.

Except that keeping up the premise meant that I was sitting in a stars-damned animal pen, waiting to be sold. Being sold to someone on this station would probably be a best case scenario, just now. Whatever got me out of the pirates’ auspices, really, and this place seemed _lush_. The kind of city I could probably find a way to melt into, given half a chance. Just had to figure out how to get that chance.

I’d seen a lot of different species passing by, none of them especially familiar to me. We were evidently far afield of the Gyli sector, wherever we were. I hadn’t seen a single Kuot or Nakta or Ilkuru. The language that the majority seemed to be speaking - the one that synthetic translators were translating into - wasn’t something I could manage. It was all clicks and chirps, pops and puffs of air, dual-toned whistles. My guess was that it was the native tongue of the meter-tall, exoskeleton-bearing species that seemed particularly common. Meaning that they were probably in social power. If I was angling for someone to buy me, that was the species to aim for.

That line of thought was cut short by the approach of a pair of _really_ imposing-looking aliens. One was clearly avian - beaked, covered in simple feathers in shades of brown and green, walking on two scaly feet armed with wicked claws. It was balanced at the hip, head and torso counterbalanced by a long, stiff tail. 

The other alien was… deeply confusing. It was tetraform, with bilateral symmetry, lean and muscular. It walked on two spindly legs without apparent need for any kind of counterbalance, a feat that spoke of terrifying agility. It didn’t have an immediately apparent center of balance - it was a _column_. I couldn’t tell much about its legs, because of the clothing it was wearing, but its torso was less obfuscated - it was wearing a layer of form-fitting fabric, and its arms were bare to the shoulder. The skin there, and on its face, was smooth. It didn’t seem wet, though, so it probably wasn’t amphibious? The top of its head bore a dark mane, fur or feathers, I couldn’t tell at this distance. I’d have expected powerful jaws on a creature so large and muscular, but the alien had an absurdly foreshortened face with no hint of a muzzle. Its mouth looked...fleshy. Soft. There was a structure in the middle of its face where its nasal slits should have been, and a pair of wide ovoid eyes above that. The eyes had dark centers surrounded by a startlingly white sclera. It was carrying a tablet in one of its very dexterous-looking hands, the other moving across the tablet’s surface with quick, precise movements. 

I curled up on myself and tried to be as unobtrusive as possible, because being noticed by those two would probably be… bad. The avian one was absolutely and without a doubt a carnivore, and there was a decent likelihood that this livestock market was selling _meat animals_.

Luck was, as usual, not going my way. The avian one made a sharp noise, catching the other’s attention, and both of them came stalking toward me.


	3. Gray

We arrived at the commons half an hour later. They’d turned into a popup market that reminded me of vendors at powwow - rows of racks and tables displaying available wares. 

I wasn’t super clear on how payment was actually going to work. We didn’t do currency, here on Tsaǂbenkt. Closest thing we had was a kind of loose merit system; you earned merit by being a good and useful member of society. Nobody went without their basic needs; personal or shared quarters depending on preference, access to nutritious food - but producing value was how you got extras in life. Value came in lots of forms, though. I managed the earth biosphere because I legitimately cared about ecosystem husbandry. There wasn’t a whole lot I’d rather be doing, on a given day, than hanging around in the forest making observations and taking notes. Zhane made really awesome coffee, owing to the fact that they loved coffee as an artform and loved the social niche of being The Human Who Makes Coffee - the center of gossip networks, part time therapist, someone who knew everyone who was anyone, a people-watcher. Vherka’s syndicate was the nearest thing we had to security; folks who deescalated situations and could, if pressed, muscle trouble makers off to a quiet room to talk to social workers or cultural consultants or medical staff or whoever else needed to address whatever problem that’d led to the escalated situation. 

“Look, haptas!” Vherka said, whistling joyously, taking off at the kind of loping, ground-eating walk that made griken famously terrifying to everyone but humans. They’d evolved as pursuit predators too. Probably why we got on so well, humans and griken. 

I caught up to her surveying a pen full of gray, shaggy, horned animals. 

“The meat's very good if you know how to cook it,” Vherka said, “but mostly they're for making textiles out of their hairs. Never seen them this color. Haptas are usually brown.”

“Odds they’ve been through the appropriate livestock-clearance procedure?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Eh, they’re not going into a biosphere alive probably,” Vherka said, waving a dismissive hand. “I was here before, in the dark morning, watching them put things out. Don’t make a fuss about it, but there are definitely some pirates here. From the goods, I think someone sacked and looted a colony ship. Poor sorry bunch of assholes going out nowhere to start a farm, and pirates got them. That's more attention that we should be paying to the provenance of goods, though. It’s  _ rude _ .”

“Yes ma'am,” I said, offering a flourish with my right hand. “No questions asked.”

I knew the kind of galactic neighborhood we were in. We got to be here because of social understandings between the directorate and the local ecosystem of criminals, cultists, outcases, and anyone else who’d willfully left a planetary or stationary society for a nomadic life on the rim. 

The haptas had been broken into groups of twenty or so per paddock. The last paddock, though, farthest from the door, held a different kind of animal - something about the size of a biggish dog. It was curled up around itself, an indecipherable knot of blue-gray limbs. I stepped up to the end of the fencing and made a tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk noise. The thing that unfolded itself was most definitely not a dog, at least not in the earth sense.

It was hexapodal, with bilateral symmetry. Starting from the head and following the line of its spine, Its first set of limbs - what would have corresponded to arms on a human - had clearly been adapted for walking. They were muscular and compact, terminating in four-toed hooves. It had a pair of dewclaws, a bit higher up and angled backward, that sported spurs. The second pair of limbs were smaller, the toes longer but still capped with hoof-points. It had six definite toes on those limbs. Just now it was bracing them against the deck, but they looked like utility limbs - adapted for digging, maybe, as well as walking. It’s third set of limbs were smallest, tucked up against its torso, ending in spiderly little hands that reminded me of a raccoon or possum. Definitely adapted for fine motor tasks. Apart from a pale, fluffy mane that crowned its head and continued down its back to a point between its shoulders, it was hairless. Its skin was smooth and leathery-looking, a shade of blue-gray with darker markings on its flanks. The ears reminded me of a deer's - mobile, swinging forward at my tsk-ing and then back to flatten against its head. It had whiskers around its mouth and above its eyes, a little stouter than a cat's whiskers - looking more like quills, actually. Its eyes were a very pretty shade of green, fading to golden yellow in the center against the blackness of its pupil. It was looking at me with an unsettling level of intelligence, meeting my eyes for the barest moment before looking down, like a dog that expected to be kicked.

I crouched down, making myself smaller, tucking the tablet away. I extended a hand through the bars of the pen, keeping a loose fist, offering to let it smell me. The animal didn't seem inclined to do so, staring at my hand between darting glances at my face, like it had no idea what to do. Maybe it wasn't an olfactory-driven creature. Those eyes and ears would certainly offer plenty of other sensory input.

I hailed the proprietor, a middle aged Nexir with wicked scarring across the left half of their face, missing two eyes. 

“What can you tell me about this animal?” I asked as they strutted over.

“It came as a lot with the haptas,” they said. “Don’t know what it is.”

“Can I take a closer look at it?” I asked.

“You serious about buying?” they asked, barbles curling in annoyance.

“If it’s the kind of thing I think it is, yes. But I need to get close enough to interact with it.”

“Gonna need you to say in front of a witness that I’m not responsible if it bites or kicks you or something,” the proprietor said, holding up a hand to tell me to stay put while they fetched another member of the crew.

When they opened the pen up, I approached the creature with slow and deliberate care. It edged back a couple of steps, but stopped when I stopped. I crouched again, and extended my hand, and waited.

It was a minute or so before the creature cautiously moved toward me.

“Shhhh, easy,” I crooned, keeping still. “Not gonna hurt you.”

It didn't growl or bolt or anything, so after another minute I slowly reached and pet it, running my hand through its tatty mane. Its facial muscles twitched in a way that looked involuntary when I touched the base of its eyebrow-whiskers. I kept on petting it and saying shushing nonsense at it, and it seemed to relax, even leaning into the petting when I ran my knuckles along the back of its neck. I proceeded with tameness testing and in due course it let me handle its hands, its feet, its ears. It let me look at its teeth, even, opening its mouth obediently when I pressed against the point of its jaw. Based on those teeth, it was probably an omnivore with a carnivore bent. That was worth knowing, because it looked seriously undernourished. It was trembling under my hands, and I could probably have made a pretty accurate count of its bones. I stroked it again and told it that it was a good creature before standing up and taking several backward steps, allowing the proprietor to close the pen again.

“Didn’t know you knew animal-carefulness,” Vherka said when I turned to her.

“I mean, I do manage a forest,” I said. “I’ve had up close and personal encounters with lots of animals.”

“You know what it is?” she asked.

“My best guess? It's a sheepdog.”

“A  _ what _ now?” Vherka asked.

“On earth we've got this species called 'dogs' that are domesticated predators-”

“Humans domesticated predators?” she said brightly, with a cackle of laughter, “Have I mentioned today that your entire species is fucking crazy? Because you're all fucking crazy. It’s why I love you.”

“Yeah, yeah, heard it,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Humans and wolves were kind of in the same ecological niche, back when. In competition with each other. They hooked up with us symbiotically, and we've been in a convergent evolution situation for like fifty thousand terran years. We had dogs when I was a kid, back on Mishánnock.”

“So if dog is an animal symbiote, what is  _ sheep _ dog in particular?” she asked.

“Sheep are another kind of domesticated animal, not unlike these haptas. When humanity got around to domesticating sheep and goats and such – social herd animals to harvest for meat and milk and wool-”

“You're telling me that your species domesticated the predators  _ before _ you domesticated the normal livestock!?” Vherka squawked, then cackled again. 

I continued more loudly, glaring at her.

“When we domesticated herd animals, we selectively bred some dogs to help in the basic work of herding. Dogs like that are kind of frighteningly smart, now. Some border collies know like a thousand words, and can understand grammar and exhibit abductive and deductive reasoning. I'm thinking that whatever this animal is, it slots into the same kind of category – a domestic animal trained in the management of other domestic animals. Only reason I can think of for it to be in the same lot as a bunch of haptas. I mean, it's clearly attentive, and it seems pretty intelligent. I bet it's trainable.”

I looked back at the not!sheepdog, tsk-ing to get its attention. When it was looking at me, I snapped my fingers a couple of times and made a ‘come here’ gesture with both hands. The not!sheepdog only paused for half a second before coming toward us, looking alert and curious even though it seemed to be trembling. I crouched again and reached through the bars to scratch it behind the ears. I felt it relax under my hand, leaning into the petting again. I looked up at Vherka and said,

“I am absolutely buying this animal.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Regarding the intelligence of sheepdogs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omaHv5sxiFI


	4. Vösh

Nobody explained anything to me, but I picked up from context that the alien who’d spent the better part of the last half hour running its hands through my hair and caressing the back of my neck had purchased me. It was definitely a mammal, just from how warm its hands were. It’d gone for a while and come back with a kind of harness that looped criss-cross around my chest and shoulders, to which it’d attached a leash. 

Using that leash, it led me away from the pirates and their pen of farm animals. 

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. I didn’t know anything about the mammal that’d bought me - but my liver was telling me that I was safer, following it at heel like a tame skagga, than I would have been trying to make an escape from the pirates. Stupid to trust my liver’s advice, since it had gotten me into one shit situation after another these past couple of years.

The mammal talked to its avian companion as the three of us walked, and I tried to pay attention to the sounds it was making with its mouth. Lots of it sounded like phonemes I could conceivably make, given practice. I wondered how many of this species were on the station, whether they all spoke that language. It seemed to command a degree of respect from other people on the station; they made way for us. Might well have been fear, though - couldn’t blame the little fragile exoskeletal people if they were afraid of the two-meter tall monster that was holding my leash and its even bigger friend with the scythe claws and flesh-rending beak. The language that one was speaking was an indistinct low-pitched rumble, something I felt more than heard.

If I was going to make a place for myself in whatever underbelly this station had, I’d need to know the local politics - what species held power and influence and wealth. So far everything I’d seen here was very neat and polished, not the kind of place that people like me were allowed to be. Except that here, no one knew what ‘people like me’ meant. I was an animal being led on a leash by a person who evidently held some measure of social power.

We came to an intersection and stopped moving, and the two of them kept talking, and the mammal glanced at me and put its hand on my head. It combed its fingers through my mane while it talked to the avian. I leaned into it, because it was warm and it was gentle and it felt like praise. I didn’t know what I’d done to earn praise.

The avian walked away, and the alien holding my leash didn’t follow. It made that soft tongue click sound at me again, and once it had my attention it led me off in a different direction. We passed through a small room that was absolutely an airlock, because the change of atmosphere was abrupt and obvious. I couldn’t stop myself taking a deep breath - it was less scrubbed than the air in the section we’d come from, warmer, a little more humid. There was a smell… it was hard to compare it to anything, but my mind kept scrambling for comparisons anyway. It had the companionable muskiness of a khavre ridden to lathered sweat, but somehow cleaner and more refined. There was an undertone of fleshy sweetness, like overripe tsingafruit. It reminded me of the smell of the open market back on Gyli Prime - the scent of the sun-baked estuary mud, the spice market, the fruit and flowers, the bodily scents of thousands of khavri and chaanta and people. There were food smells, too, reminding me that it’d been days since I’d last been able to scrounge a meal. I looked up at the alien holding my leash. Maybe if I was a tame skagga with a tractable temperament, I’d get fed.

There were other aliens of the same species as the one leading me, here - enough that I could begin to piece together generalities. They all seemed to be shades of brown, on any skin left exposed by clothing. Some were pale and pinkish, some very dark. There didn’t seem to be much similarity in their clothing; they weren’t wearing uniforms. The one holding my leash stopped to talk to others, more than once - most of the encounters were quite brief, but it spent the better part of half an hour talking to a human that was very clothed. The only parts of it not covered by layers of patterned cloth were its face and its hands. It was one of the darker-skinned ones, a bit shorter and more slender than the one holding my leash.

The alien brought me to what was undoubtedly some kind of medical bay. I felt my mane fluffing in alarm at the prospect of the many things that could be done to me in a med bay. There were two other aliens of the same species here, one paler than the other. The paler one had a mane in vivid shades of blue and green, something I hadn’t seen yet among the others - I wondered if it was a cosmetic affectation. The darker one was roughly the same shade of brown as ‘my’ alien, but with a different tone. 

After talking to the other aliens for a while, my alien turned its attention to me, crouching to pet and click and murmur at me. It was fluid and obvious about all its movements as it wrapped its massive arms around me and lifted me up - with no apparent difficulty - onto a metal table. I tensed, because metal tables seldom meant anything pleasant. 

It was a huge relief that the only thing that followed was scanning. The darker of the two new aliens had a couple of different handheld scanners that it swept over me. My alien kept petting my head and neck and shoulders, making soothing nonsense sounds. It coaxed me to open my mouth again, like it had back at the market, and the blue-haired one slipped a kind of probe between my teeth and gum line, pressing hard enough that it was probably collecting live cells. Not hard enough to draw blood, though. 

Nothing more invasive than that happened, and after a short while my alien picked me up again and put me back on the floor. It led me to another chamber, this one outfitted with seating made to the aliens’ conformation. My alien sat and turned its attention to a tablet that it produced from some fold or pocket of its clothing, and for a long while nothing else happened. I lowered myself to the floor, letting my limbs go lax. It was pleasantly warm here, and quiet. My alien reached to pet me now and again. I let myself relax into it and drift, filled with an absurd and unfounded sense of safety. I was half asleep when the other aliens came back and spoke at length with my alien again. Eventually, after a long while, my alien made the soft clicking noise at me again, something I was almost certain was meant to get my attention. 

It led me through further corridors and intersections with practiced ease, and we eventually arrived at what had to be a dwelling space. There was a padded seating area opposite an entertainment console, a low table between them. The floor was covered in planks of wood… the genuine article, from what I could tell. The alien unclipped the leash from the harness I was wearing. I stayed close to it, regardless, as it moved through the room. Good to have an anchor, in an unfamiliar place.

It walked to the wall and did something with a latch that made a workstation unfold. There was a matter printer set into the wall behind it. It stood there, consulting its tablet, glancing now and again at the printer. Probably transferring new data. It pressed a few buttons, and produced first a bowl of water and then a bowl of something that smelled absolutely fucking amazing. I hadn't had anything to eat except mealy, tasteless nutrition cubes in longer than I could remember, and not even those since the pirates had overrun the colony ship. I moved to sit at the alien's feet, gazing up at it in open supplication, wanting more than anything to find out what I needed to do to be allowed some of whatever was in that bowl. It looked down at me and spoke, its words incomprehensible but its tone gentle and reassuring. It bent to pet me again, and I leaned into it. It crossed the room in a few strides and set both bowls down against the wall near the door. Then it sat down on the padded seating platform in front of the currently-deactivated entertainment console and...watched me.

I looked at the alien, then at the bowls on the floor, placed within my easy reach. This was a test. I didn't know what I was supposed to do. The alien gestured toward the bowls, making a soft sound. 

I was thirsty and starving, and if it was going to punish me for taking something that was within reach, that was worth knowing.

The water bowl was huge, made to the alien’s proportions, and I needed three hands to lift it. I used the fourth hand to brace against the floor as I tilted it and drank. I tried to be judicious with the water and only take what I absolutely needed, because I had no way of knowing how long this supply was supposed to last, but  _ stars _ it tasted pure. When I'd slaked my thirst as much as I dared, I turned my attention to the other bowl. It was full of little pale cubes, each about a centimeter across, and they smelled like sin. It felt like a trap. I looked at the alien and kept my gaze locked on it as I reached to take one. As I brought it slowly to my mouth. As I tucked it inside and bit down. My eyes closed and I loosed a long purring moan because I hadn’t expected it to be that good. It had the slightly spongy texture common to printed food, but it was tender and fatty, melting salty-sweet on my tongue. I was torn between a desire to carefully savor every morsel of this and the desire to cram as much of it as I could into my face before I lost the opportunity. 

I'd only eaten half of what was in the bowl before I was too full to continue. I hoped I'd be allowed to eat the rest of it later. I stretched out on the floor, folding my legs behind my head, reveling in the sensation of a full belly. Wondering what I'd done to deserve a reward like this. The alien came over and crouched beside me, running a huge hand across my chest and belly, looking at me with an indecipherable expression. All this abrupt intimacy was weird as hell, but...really nice, actually? Made me feel safe in a way I hadn’t since the raid on the monestary. There wasn’t a lot of hard evidence to base that feeling on, but it was there just the same.

The alien went back to the padded seating area and sat down, pulling out its tablet and using it to activate the entertainment console. It turned its attention to whatever was happening on the screen, but looked back at me every couple of minutes. I decided to take a calculated risk, getting up and moving closer, hesitating for just a moment before hauling myself up onto the platform. I situated myself against the cushioned back, reveling in this level of casual comfort, waiting for the alien’s reaction. The alien didn’t seem motivated to put me back on the floor. It reached over to run its big, warm fingers through my mane again, to cradle the back of my head and home in on the sensitive spots behind my ears. I closed my eyes and leaned into it, weighing the idea of just pretending to be a tame animal for the rest of my life.


	5. Gray

There was no way this thing hadn't been someone's pet before. It’d fallen asleep on the sofa beside me while I half paid attention to a couple of episodes of the show that Vherka had been needling me about for the last couple of weeks. As predicted by her summary, it really wasn’t my thing. But now I could tell her that I’d given it a shot.

The alien kibble seemed to have gone over really well with my new pet. The scans and swabs Chana had taken had allowed her to extrapolate its nutritional requirements and its biochemical compatibility with earth foods. I’d been right about it being an omnivore. 

The biological scans indicated that it produced small, motile gametes in a pair of organs in its abdomen. It was equipped with a genital structure that could externally express those gametes. It didn't have any ova-producing organs. I willing to climb out on a wing and declare it male - not that the animal was likely to care about gender assignment. I decided to call him Aûsuppand, because he seemed a whole lot like an alien raccoon - probably filled a similar ecological niche back on whatever planet his species originated from. He had dexterous little hands that he’d used to take food from the bowl and bring to his mouth, rather than sticking his face in the bowl like a dog or cat would have.

I printed out a collar for him, something made of breathable tensile mesh with both a printed nameplate and a data seed containing my contact information in case he turned out to be an escape artist and got himself lost in the hallways. That didn't seem especially likely, though, since he obviously knew how to heel and sit and stay and everything. He was attentive, like a dog, looking to me for cues.

I watched four episodes of the show before calling it a night, leaving my new pet sleeping on the sofa. He was already awake when I got up the next morning, eating the rest of his alien kibble. His attention went right to me as soon as I appeared in the doorway, and he paused for a couple of seconds, looking right at me while he popped a piece of food into his mouth. Like he was waiting for a reaction. I broke eye contact first, stretching and padding my way toward the kitchen to heat up a bowl of nausamp.

After eating and showering and dressing and braiding my hair, I set myself up a thermos full of coffee. It was coming onto autumn in the biosphere, so I got my jacket - and Aûsuppand’s leash - from the hooks by the door. 

Time to see how he reacted to a stretch of northeast woodland.


	6. Vösh

My alien put a collar around my neck. It wasn’t the first time I’d been made to wear a collar, but there was something implicitly different about the experience this time. It clicked into place with a plastic noise; it wouldn’t be any kind of challenge to just take it off if I felt inclined. Should have felt inclined, because even more than the harness and the leash a collar was a mark of  _ ownership _ .

But this collar wasn’t anything like the one that’d been riveted into place in the prison camp back on Gyli that had marked me as indebted to the government. This collar was made of cloth, comfortable against my skin. A visible, tactile, solid piece of evidence that showed I was associated with this alien. That I was one of its possessions, something important enough to be marked. In turnabout, I’d never fucking  _ dare _ to lay hands on something that belonged to an alien as big and imposing as this one. I wondered, idly, if it had a tracker built into it. If it was a precaution against me wandering off and getting lost. If it meant, to other aliens on this station, what I thought it meant.

My alien put the leash on me again and took me back out into the corridors, but we followed an entirely different path than the one we’d followed yesterday. It was a short journey, this time - we didn’t meet any other aliens on the way to our destination.

We passed through an airlock with a UV decontamination cycle; I closed my eyes against the light out of habit and my alien scratched the back of my neck when I did. Felt like approval. The cycle ended, the airlock opened, and he walked me onto a fucking planet.

We were outside. There was no doubt in my mind that we were  _ outside _ . 

It had to be some kind of holographic projection, but everything about it felt real. The sounds, the smells, the gentle breeze that caught at my whiskers… I couldn’t take another breath, because everything was telling me that I was on a planet and that I was outside and it had been better than two years since I’d had a chance to set foot outdoors…

I was not going to cry about it. I wasn’t.

My alien crouched to unclip the leash from my harness, ruffling my mane, saying a string of totally incomprehensible words at me. I caught my breath then, taking in the complex and layered scent of this place. My alien stood back up and watched me. I followed it with my gaze, looking past it, upward. We were standing under a canopy of leaves, mostly green but some red and yellow and orange. Walls curved away in both directions from the door we’d come through, stretching as far as I could see, painted to match the forest in front of us. There was a narrow path following the wall, a space a couple of meters wide paved with some kind of gravel. The walls curved up into an impossibly high domed ceiling that looked exactly like a bright blue sky. There was an obvious path right ahead of us, winding through the trees and bushes…not paved like the path against the wall; a narrow dirt path cross-crossed by roots and moss. I swallowed hard and looked back at my alien, having not the slightest notion was it expected of me. 

When I didn’t do anything at all for a minute, it made that same hushed clicking noise at me and walked past me, down the path. It turned to look at me, and jerked its head in a ‘follow me’ gesture.

So I followed it.

My alien moved through the forest with a practiced confidence, obviously knowing exactly where it was going. It would stop, now and again, to do something with its tablet or with a handheld scanner that it produced from its clothing. It didn’t seem to be paying much attention to me, other than to glance my way every so often, as if to be sure I was keeping up.

Something moved in the canopy above us, and I startled, searching. There. A little animal, something with feathers. Even as I watched it took wing, flitting away. I paid closer attention after that, keeping close to my alien but being sure to take stock of the forest around me. The little flying animals weren’t the only ones - there were quick little mammals that scampered and leaped from tree to tree, different ones that scurried in the underbrush. There were whistling, chirping calls in the air. There were tiny crawling things among the leaves, preyed upon by the fliers. It was a whole web of life, a living forest going about its business. What the entire fuck was it doing here, on a space station?

The path widened a bit, opening onto a clearing. There were three other aliens here, all of the same species as my alien. My alien stopped to talk to them, and they all showed at least a passing interest in me. This spot looked… cultivated. The ground was arranged into concentric rings of low hills; each hill had four plants with stout stalks and broad leaves growing from it, vines with prominent seed pods woven among them and climbing the stalks, the ground below covered by a different kind of vine - something with broad, lobed leaves. Too regular and ordered to be anything but deliberate.

My alien moved across the space and sat down on a fallen log, and another of the aliens joined it, and a third arrived with cups and a decanter of something. Whatever they poured out of it steamed lightly in the cool air, and had an incredibly complex smell - sweet and earthy. Nobody offered any to me, but I hardly expected them to. I kept half my attention on my alien as I walked around the clearing, careful not to touch or disturb anything. There were fruits growing on the broad-leafed vines, half-hidden under the leaves. I wondered if any or all of these plants were food crops, or cultivated for some other reason. Maybe this  _ wasn’t _ a simulation; maybe it was a farm. Maybe their species had some kind of biochemical need that couldn’t be easily synthesized by a matter printer. 

My alien talked with the others for something like three quarters from an hour before whistling and beckoning me over with a broad gesture of its arms. It continued down the path opposite the clearing, clicking its tongue at me, ruffling my mane with its broad hand when I came obedient to heel. I was getting to like that a lot more than I should have; the way my alien was so casually tactile. My alien didn’t seem to behave that way with any of the other members of its own species that it stopped to talk with, so it was animal-directed, probably. This was a nice place to be a tame animal. I didn’t know if it was a nice place to be a fugitive.

What did they think of stowaways and trespassers here? 

If I’d been caught by the crew or colonists on the ship I’d been on, I’d likely have been imprisoned and sent back to Gyli… or just as likely jettisoned into deep space, if no one wanted to deal with me. If I’d been found out by the pirates, they’d very certainly have executed me like they had the crew and colonists.

My alien might well be angry at me when he eventually found out that I was a sapient, on grounds of deception. I’d taken food and shelter from it under false pretenses after all, never mind all the petting and praise… the longer I kept playing at being an animal, the deeper I was digging myself into that hole. 

My deep, implacable, liver feeling was that my alien would want to  _ keep _ me. That it would speak in my favor to whatever authority existed here, if need be. Void, for all I knew it  _ was _ a person of significant authority here - every other alien I’d seen it interact with had seemed companionable and even deferential toward it, after all. 

I hadn’t seen any people here that were obvious slaves, but that kind of thing wasn’t always obvious. Hadn’t seen anyone who looked beaten or starved or worked half the death, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t happening somewhere else on a station as big as this. 

Better to confess my situation than to end up caught in a lie, probably.

I hoped my liver was right.


	7. Gray

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We finally learn a bit more about Vӧsh's backstory.

On the fourth day after I’d adopted Aûsuppand, I had another meeting scheduled with the director of Life Systems - this time with all three biosphere teams. We all talked about our quarterly reports and problems and plans. Took about four hours, terran time. It was the longest stretch of time I’d left Aûsuppand alone in my quarters - I’d get to see, when I returned, if he was the kind of pet that got separation anxiety and started ripping sofa cushions apart if left alone. I was prepared for the possibility of disarray when I walked back into my quarters. 

I wasn’t at all prepared to find Aûsuppand situated on the sofa, casually operating a tablet. I recognized it as the one that I kept stashed near the matter printer, one that I mostly used for data transfer and translation. He looked up at me as I walked in, and his ears immediately flattened against his skull. He shrunk on himself like a dog that'd been caught misbehaving.

“What are you even trying to do?” I asked, more to myself than to him, as I walked over with cautious care. I extended my hand toward him. He handed me the tablet. It had a document program open, and about thirty tabs of character maps from various languages. 

He stared up at me, ears back and eyes wide. He took a couple of deep breaths, his sides heaving. He swallowed hard and opened his mouth and quite clearly said, in tonless and deeply accented Tevsa,

“To have language. To want ‘Nakta’ language.”

I took a deep breath and let it out, mind reeling. I cleared the tablet and set it to audio translation, tuning the output to Tevsa-sang. 

“You can speak Tevsa-sang?” I asked.

“Tevsa-sang to have part sameness ‘Tsevzi-sung’. To have bone sameness.”

Languages in the same family, then. I swallowed again, trying to wrap my head around the situation.

“You're a  _ person _ ,” I said, slow and stupid in light of the revelation. “You've been a person this whole time.”

“Yes.”

“Why...” I faltered, my head feeling like a stalled loading screen because I had way too many tabs open. “Why didn't you  _ say _ something? Why did you let me treat you like an animal?”

“To have part ‘Inok-do’ to have part ‘Tsevzi-sung’ to have all ‘Nakta’. To have not language sameness language this place…” he said, the translator tripping badly over infinitives.

“I've been making you eat out of a bowl on the floor,” I said. “I've been just... _ touching you _ , like, all the time. Even if we don’t have a shared language, there’s lots of ways you could have tried to convey sapience to me-”

“Yes. To have deceived you. To have-” he said more, but the translator lost it. We obviously needed to download a program for the language he was actually speaking - and one for ‘Nakta’ as well, because he seemed to be indicating that it was his first language.

“Wait, I’m going to see if I can find programming for my translator, to find a language we share comfortably. What’s the name of your species, what planet do you come from?”

“To be ‘Nakt’. To be sector ‘Gyli’. To be planet ‘Gyli Prime’.”

“Ok, give me a minute,” I said, pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes and taking another deep breath. Everything had just gotten so incomprehensibly weird.

‘Nakta’ didn’t bring up anything in the shared database, and neither did ‘Gyli’, but ‘Tsevzi-sung’ led me down a rabbithole of the colonization history of Tevsa folks, to a research paper about the varian branches of Tevsa language, and finally to a paper that, thank fuck, linked to a language learning program. I downloaded it and installed it to my translator. All tolled, it took maybe ten minutes.

“Do you understand me better now?” I said, turning back to him. “I’m sorry, we don’t have Nakta.”

“Yes, that makes sentences very more good,” he replied. “I am a person, I have deceived you and others, what happens now to me?”

“Back up a second,” I said, sitting down on the sofa opposite him. “We need to... what's your  _ name _ , for starters?”

“My name is Vӧsh,” he said. “Is it permitted that I ask your name?”

“My full name is Grayfox Jennings, and I’m often called Human Jennings by not-human people, but friends call me Gray. To be clear, you can ask anything - social correctness and worries about being rude left the premises when I spent four days treating you like a dog. Can we talk about why those merchants sold you to me with the pretense that you were an animal?”

“I deceived the murder-thieves; they killed all the people, so I hid myself as an animal. The ship crew and other people were Kuot people. I think Nakt people were not known to the murder-thieves. Their kind is not known to me. I think if they knew I was a person, they would have killed me.”

“Why did you let  _ me _ think you were an animal, and treat you like one, for four days?” I asked.

“I deceived you to remain safe,” he said, casting his gaze down. “I am in breach of laws; I arrived without being permitted. As an animal, you offered shelter and food and comfort. As an animal, I took what you offered. I did not know if it would be offered to a person, less a person in breach of laws. I was cold and hungry for a long time, I had very need of….rest? I apologize for deceiving you.”

“No, that’s not even… why were you on the ship? What role did you serve? It was a colony ship, yes? That’s what Vherka thought.”

His gaze went down again, and his ears went back. 

“On that ship also I was in breach of laws. I am a criminal. I stole myself from a factory on Gyli Prime.”

“You...stole yourself?” I asked, not sure if I’d hit a translator hangup.

He took several breaths before answering, not looking at me, ears back and eyes closed.

“I...I am ‘Jant’. I was a part of  Ashka ’s Union. Myself and others, we deceived authorities on Gyli Prime. We deceived that we were...difficult to say in Tsevzi-sung, I do not have enough words...we were a house full of religion? That all people in our house were promised to a deity?”

“A convent, or a monastery,” I offered.

“Perhaps. I do not know the words you say. The house we were, truth, we helped move Jant people and others out of our nation into a different nation. Our deception was located by authorities. Our leaders were killed. Me and all others were given punishments of work. An opportunity made itself; I and some others together stole ourselves from the factory. We went many different ways, to be harder for authorities to find.” 

“Ok, so, if you were a political prisoner and you face imprisonment or death if you return to your planet, that makes you a refugee. That will definitely streamline the paperwork if you want to apply for citizenship here on Tsaǂbenkt - refugees never get denied. Can you tell me what ‘Jant’ means? The word isn’t translating.”

“To be Jant is not having… good birth? Status? To not be...caste? Clan? Outside of correct being, born wrongly. A person can be born Jant or can become Jant by incorrect behavior. Jant people cannot...have. We are supplicant, we must have benefactors, caste people who choose to give us food and shelter for work.”

An underclass; untouchables. Slaves.

“You’ve done nothing wrong, according to our laws. You will be granted asylum here - allowed to stay and become a citizen. I’ll sponsor you; be your host until you can apply for quarters of your own. You’ll be my guest. If you don’t want to stay with me, I’m sure we can find someone else on the station who’d be willing to host you-”

“I would have this safety and comfort if I am able. You would do this kindness for me when I have deceived you?” he asked, guardedly. “What would you want from me in payment?”

“No payment; this isn’t transactional. There are many students of people here who might like to talk to you about your planet and people, if you want that. I think the best first step would be programming a translating module with your primary language - Nakta, you said?”

“Yes. My birth language is Nakta. What is the language called that you speak?”

“I speak two languages. My birth language is Mishánnock - a blended language of Narragansett and Wopanaak, spoken on Mishánnock station. I also speak English, which is the commonest language among humans on Tsaǂbenkt station. I know a lot of Adri’il, because it’s the common language on the station at large, but humans don’t have the anatomy to make many of the phonemes necessary for Adri’il.”

“I can make the phonemes you make, I think,” he said, a speculative cast in his gaze. Then he said, in perfectly passable English, “Hello Gray. Good morning. Biodiversity.” He switched back to Tsevzi-sung to say, “I don’t know what these words mean, only that Gray is your name, but they are words you say and have said often with other humans.”

“If you want to learn English, it would help a lot in programming a functional Nakta-English translator module. We already have English - Adri’il and English - Tevsa-sang modules, so a functioning Nakta-English module would allow you to translate into the most commonly-spoken languages. In the meantime, I’ll need to announce you to the directorate as a guest with intent to apply for citizenship. You’ll get a residency number and an ID and your own tablet and such. We’ll have to explain to all the people I’ve already had you meet that you are not, in fact, an animal.”

“I apologize if my deception has created troubles for you-”

“It’s nothing you should worry about. You did what you thought best with the situation as it unfolded, and no one’s been hurt.”

“You paid for me…”

“I traded them a half-ton of food crops for you. If they had come to us in need and asked us for food, we’d have given it to them without expecting anything in return. You were a gift, as far as I’m concerned. You don’t owe me anything.”

“You have an uncommon kindness,” I said, looking up at me like he was waiting for the catch.

“We need to update your standard of living, now that I know you’re not an animal. Do you want clothing? Do you need the air to be different? What kind of food do you like to eat?”

“It is very warm and nice in much of the station,” he said quickly. “I don’t need clothes.”

“Didn’t ask if you needed them, asked if you wanted them,” I said, smiling. “The words are different, in English. To need is to require something for living in good health in body or mind. To want is to require something for happiness.”

He looked pensive for a moment, then said,

“There are times in the...outside place? That it is cool enough that I wouldn’t mind a robe. The air here is good, and the food you have given me is enough-”

“I know that it meets your nutritional requirements, it was derived from medical scans. But it’s  _ kibble _ . Basically survival rations. What do you actually  _ enjoy _ eating, when you have a choice?”

“I do not know? I know nothing of what is, here,” he said uncertainly, ducking his head a bit. The motion baring the back of his neck in a way that made the collar suddenly obvious.

“You don’t have to wear the collar, you know,” I said, quickly, feeling embarrassed. I’d put a collar with my contact information on him, with a name I’d assigned him. I’d been walking him around on a leash. “You can take it off.”

“I always could take it off,” he agreed. “Is it incorrect that I wear it? Among my people a collar is a mark of… benefactoring. It shows others that I, a Jant, have a caste-person who has use for me. A Jant with no neck adornment is not safe, not permitted in places that people are. Among my people, authorities would remove an unmarked Jant from people places.”

“If it makes you more comfortable to wear it-”

“I’ll take it off if it is improper in some way-”

“No, no, it’s ok. Just expect people to ask questions about it, especially human people. If you don’t feel like answering you can lean on the language barrier. That said, would you like to go to commerce with me? It’s where people who choose arts that provide good to others trade their wares. Foodsellers, clothing-makers, crafters of goods - that kind of people.”

“I have nothing to offer in trade…” he faltered.

“Don’t worry,” I said with a smile. “I’ll be your benefactor.”


	8. Vösh

My liver had been right, but in the most incomprehensible of ways. Gray did, in fact, want to keep me. To become my benefactor, without even questioning me about my skills or usefulness, even knowing that I was a criminal. I’d fully expected to be given into the custody of authorities, at least in the short term, and interrogated about my origins and intentions. I’d fully expected to be punished for my deceit and my trespass.

None of that seemed to be happening.

Instead, Gray guided me through the branching corridors with practiced ease. I wasn’t wearing the tether and leash, but I still felt inclined to follow them at heel. It felt safer. They hadn’t pet me or ruffled my mane even once since they’d walked into the dwelling place and seen me using their tablet. 

It was foolish of me to consider that a loss. Gray was treating me as a person, now.

“Before other actions, we will do government with authorities to make you a person who lives in this place. We will obtain you a translator alike to mine, to help with talking to many people,” Gray was saying as we walked. They spoke to me in English, and the tablet I was carrying - the one one I’d pilfered from Gray’s printing station - translated it into Tsevzi-sung both in text and in quiet synthesized speech. The translator that Gray used seemed to seamlessly intake any of several languages and deliver auditory translation into English directly into Gray’s ear.

“Do you want to look at clothing before food, or food before clothing?”

Gray seemed very concerned with clothing, and thinking back over the last few days I couldn’t recall seeing a human wholly unclothed - many humans were covered in layers of cloth, some in spare and utilitarian attire, but all of them were covered from the lower part of the torso to partway down the legs. It was quite likely that humans had a nudity taboo, at least regarding that part of the body. It was probably a good idea for me to accept Gray’s repeated suggestion of clothing. There was probably a layer of cultural appropriateness that I was missing.

“Clothing before food, if that pleases you,” I said, cautiously, gauging their reaction. It was apparently the correct choice, because Gray seemed to relax a bit in their stance and movement. 

“Excellent,” Gray said. “Sadge will enjoy to meet you. We are going now - the station is radial-shape. We’re in the human place right now, going toward the radial center. Market place and ship attachment place are there. From the radial center are three best habitat places; the human place, the adri place and the tevsa place. The radial center place is a communion of habitat needfulness. I opinion that it is too cold and too dry, but that is the way of communion.”

We stopped first at a place that looked very authoritative; some kind of office of operations. I only understood part of what occured there, but images were taken of me and Gray helped me complete a document with very simple questions. When it was completed, I was presented with a tablet and a translator. Gray impressed upon me that these things were now my personal property.

Jants were not permitted to have personal property. For all of my life, everything that had been ‘mine’ was just something that I was allowed, by a benefactor, to use - or something I’d stolen or made use of without such allowance. I didn’t quite believe that these things were  _ mine _ now, but I was glad to be allowed to use them. 

The translator was a small electronic device that clipped onto my ear with a magnet closure. Gray showed me how to access its controls with a tablet and set the output language to Tevsa-sang. I didn’t understand all of it, because there were significant differences between Tevsa-sang and Tsevzi-sung and I only halfway understood the latter, but it was infinitely better than the total incomprehension of speech that I’d been coping with these last few days. 

It was absolutely bizarre how little anyone seemed to care about the fact that I’d entered the station under false pretenses and had been lying about my identity for four days for expressly self-serving reasons. The Tevsa who was processing my documentation warmly welcomed me to the community. That was all it took for me to become a guest resident of Tsaǂbenkt station. Citizenship would be a longer process, but I was sanctioned to remain on the station so long as I had a host. A benefactor. 

I’d spent the last ten years, by Gyli reckoning, opposing the basal concept of benefactors. Fighting for the rights of unsponsored or badly sponsored Jants. Helping them cross the border, when possible. Now here I was tying myself to an alien benefactor, and all I could feel was the basest relief. I’d been wholly unsponsored since leaving Gyli, always on guard. 

I couldn’t help wondering what Dymӧr would think of me, if he could see me now. 

Dymӧr was dead. Sash didn’t get to have opinions. 

We arrived at the market place, heralded by the scent of food before anything else. I began regretting my choice to agree to seeing about clothing first. I’d become spoiled by ready access to food, these last days. I’d eaten ‘kibble’ that morning, in Gray’s absence. There was no reason for me to be hungry.

Gray, with much enthusiasm, brought me to a human named Sadge - a crafter of clothing. They asked me to step onto an imaging device that produced a digital model of my body, and proceeded to chatter - too quickly for my translator to keep up with - about kinds of fabric and ways of hanging, fastenings and openings, colors, layers. The language barrier was acute and obvious, and Gray tried as much as possible to help me decipher what Sadge was talking about, with limited success. I felt bad about my incapacity to understand, because Sadge seemed even more enthused at the concept of dressing me than Gray had. 

“This must suffice,” Sadge said, taking notes on the potential designs that I’d expressed approval of, “Return when you are more English and we can have some actual fun, yes?”

“If Gray desires that,” I said, uncertainly. 

“It will be your choice, not mine,” Gray said, smiling at me.

It was very frustrating, because I was becoming more and more certain that there was some kind of translation failing regarding Gray’s status as my benefactor and my status as their supplicant.

We left the shop with instructions to return after ‘lunch’ - a scheduled midday meal. I was wearing a form-fitting bodysuit of smooth knitted fabric that had been fabricated entirely without intelligent intervention by a combination of the body scanner and a matter printer. It was an especially lovely shade of blue. Sadge referred to it as ‘underpinnings’, and Gray tried to explain that it was wholly utilitarian and meant exclusively for warmth and social acceptability - Sadge would be constructing another, more elaborate layer while Gray and I ate.

I waited until we’d parted company with Sadge to ask Gray,

“How will Sadge be paid?”

“Oh, Sadge makes clothes because Sadge enjoys making clothes,” Gray said, “The parts of the creation that are not entertainment are done with computer machines.”

“I think there’s a misunderstanding or a translation flaw. I wish to know what debts I’m incurring.”

“You’re not incurring any debts,” Gray said, seeming puzzled. “Sadge wants to make clothes for you because Sadge enjoys making clothes and seeing that people wear them. It is the art Sadge practices.”

“I don’t understand. Sadje is doing skilled work, making clothes for me. It requires materials and tools. If Sadje isn’t paid, how are these things obtained? Why does Sadje do work if not being paid?”

“Because making clothes is what Sadje wants to do - the role they’ve chosen. Materials are provided to them because they will create value with the materials.”

“How are materials obtained?” I asked.

“We generate most of what we need here on the station; especially in the biospheres. The kind of matter printers we have can begin with many different raw materials. We can talk more about how the station government and economy when we share more language - it is difficult now. A question before we eat; are there foods that you cannot or choose not to eat? Flesh of animals, plants of...religion? The kibble is all created in the printer from smallest parts, but some foods at the market place are less taken apart and put back together.”   


“You have actual animal flesh?” I asked.

“Several kinds. Some animals that make the biosphere correctly be can easily become too many. Because of place size we have only six or eight ‘wolves’ at a time, not enough to balance ‘deer’, so we harvest ‘deer’. We also harvest many kinds of ‘fish’ and ‘crustaceans’ from the water place in the biosphere. Do you have opposition to eating flesh?”

“I eat what’s given to me and take it gladly,” I said, out of habit. I’d spent the better part of ten years pretending to be a monk. “If meat isn’t from people, I have no objections to it. I like meat, when I can get it.”

“Medical scans show that you can eat most human foods; they will not hurt you. Adri foods need more careful because adri can eat heavy metals and not be hurt. Tevsa foods are safe but, I think, very boring. Humans are very...very about what we eat. You choose, walk to what smells good, what you want to eat.”

I sighed inwardly, frustrated again at being given choices without knowing the fullness of their consequences. If I horribly mistepped, I hoped I’d be allowed to fall back on my ignorance. I followed Gray toward the food-sellers and their wide array of amazing smells.


	9. Gray

I was getting the impression that Vӧsh did not grok, in some fundamental way, the idea of anarcho-socialism. He was very concerned with payment and debt. He probably came from a culture that was heavily mired in capitalism. We’d have to talk about it in greater detail once we’d arrived at a shared language.

“Tevsa are obligate raw vegans with a small number of plants they can happily eat - and also they photosynthesize because of algae living in their skin. They don’t really do cooking, not the way humans and adri do cooking. A lot of human food is very dangerous for adri, if it wasn’t made for them in mind. A lot of adri food is dangerous for humans, too. Humans are hyper-omnivores. We kind of specialized in eating and enjoying plants that are toxic. Your medical scans indicate that you should be able to eat most human foods, but you probably should be cautious with known, flagged chemicals - alcohol, caffeine, menthol, capsaicin, curcumin, gingerol, theobromine.”

“The words now, not any translate,” Vӧsh said, dipping his head forward and scratching the back of his neck.

“Like I said, walk toward what smells good. I’ll warn you if there’s a flagged chemical in the dish and you can try a small sample to see how it impacts you biochemically,” I said. “If you’re looking for suggestions, I know that Jendri has been selling maple-cured smoked venison recently - she specialized in smoked and fermented meats. It’s autumn in the earth biosphere now - a transitional season from the hot time of year to the cold time of year - so lots of cooks are offering pumpkin spice  _ everything _ . That’s something you maybe should worry about, at least a little. All the parts of pumpkin spice - cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, clove - have flagged chemicals. It’s also the beginning of the season to harvest nuts. Chestnut, hickory, pecan, black walnut, and chinquepin hazelnut are the mast crops in our biosphere - how we generate most protein, fat, and sugar. We grow two kinds of oak as well, but acorns aren’t as valued as a food for humans. Turkeys like them a lot, though, and turkeys are delicious birds.”

I couldn’t help but notice that Vӧsh was absolutely not taking the lead regarding picking a food stand. He was staying at heel, just like he had when I’d been walking him around on a leash. I wondered if it was an anxiety thing or a cultural thing or something else. I decided not to press it - he’d been here for four and a half days and had spent four of those being a dog. 

I walked us in the general direction of Jendri’s stand. She had several hoof-on venison haunches hanging on a rack and one cradled in a ham holder. She had a whole smoked turkey on display, too, but didn’t seem to be slicing one up just now. 

Pretty much all of the food available at commerce was ‘artisanal’ in one way or another. Stuff that was about technique and process, stuff that couldn’t be printed. Folks from earth were often really impressed with the food here, and boggled by the fact that it wasn’t -expensive-. Because it was the result of people only cooking what they wanted, when they wanted, for the joy or the challenge or whatever. 

“Hey Gray!” Jendri said, glancing from me to Vӧsh as we approached. “Who’s your friend?”

“Jendri, this is Vӧsh. I’m sponsoring him for citizenship here on the station. Vӧsh, this is Jendri. She makes the best use of the deer produced in the biosphere, at least in my opinion.”

“Don’t let Marco hear you say that, or he’ll pout for a week,” Jendri said, laughing. “I heard you adopted a pet recently?”

“Yeah, about that,” I said, wincing, “Turns out I don’t have a pet, I have a roommate with a communication barrier. Do not start.”

“That why your friend is wearing a dog collar?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. 

“I said ‘do not start’. Anyhow, I’m introducing Vӧsh to the wonders of human cuisine and you’re the first stop,” I said, wrestling the topic back to food.

“I’m flattered,” she said with a grin. “If you’re putting together a lunch plate I super recommend hitting up Wren for apple cider, this batch pairs really well with the meat. I mean, the applejack punch pairs  _ best _ , but it’s kind of early in the day for alcohol. Oh, and Chaz is back on a cranberry kick and he’s making that brown rice salad stuff with the cranberries and walnuts and pumpkin seeds.”

“Sounds awesome,” I said. “Could we grab a few slices of meat from you?”

Our tour of nearby foods landed us with plates of venison, rice salad, roasted winter squash with toasted pecans, and apple cider. I found a place for us to sit that was backed up against one of the planters because I had a hunch that Vӧsh would be more comfortable if he could keep an eye on all approaches. He seemed more generally nervous here than he had in my quarters or in the biosphere. 

“A question, if it is permissible to ask,” Vӧsh began as we sat, looking over his shoulder at the people milling around the commerce shops, “In English you say different theys for different people. Why is this?”

“Oh yeah, Tevsa-sang’s got just the one pronoun set,” I said. “English has maybe half a dozen that are in common usage. Pronouns are mostly to do with gender expression. I’m a man, I use ‘he/him/his’ pronouns. Sadge uses ‘they/them/theirs’ pronouns - I’m not exactly sure how they self define regarding gender, we’re not close like that. Jendri is a woman, and uses ‘she/her/hers’ pronouns. Those three are the most common sets of pronouns, but we also have humans on board who use ‘ey/em/eirs’ and ‘ze/zer/zers’. Lots of nonhuman folks can’t  _ even _ with human genders, and refer to everyone as ‘Human Surname’ or ‘Human Firstname’. When to use first names and when to use surnames is another thorny, complicated thing.”

“This is… caste role?” he asked uncertainly.

“That could open up a whole philosophical argument, regarding humans. What gender even is, I mean. In ancient times in some human cultures, only men and women were recognized, and the category was assigned at birth based on what visible reproductive organs the infant had. We still do this to talk about animals; use gender words to talk about reproductive role. Animals don’t care, mostly. People do, very much.”

“How can it be discerned, gender, with humans?” he asked.

“The best way is asking,” I said. “There are some ways of educated guessing - body shape, and clothing choice, and hair style, and facial hair - that kind of thing. But they’re all super variable, not to be relied on. It’s better to ask.”

“What gender am I, to humans?” he asked.

“That’s something you’d have to tell me,” I said with a chuff of nervous laughter, because I had absolutely  _ not _ followed correct behavior. I’d introduced Vӧsh with he/him pronouns to everyone, out of habit. “I’ve been presuming that you’re male, because of the medical scans and what they indicate about your anatomy, but you’re not an animal. You determine your own gender.”

He looked very confused, tilting his head to stare at me like he wasn’t sure if I was serious.

“What gender are you, among Nakh?” I asked.

“We don’t… it isn’t a thing that exists for Nakh, I think? Unless I understand badly. What ‘pronouns’ a person is called by is determined by caste. I am Jant. I am called by Jant pronouns.”

“What does the category mean? How many categories are there? How are they determined? Are they fixed, or changeable? Distinct, or fluid?”

“There are five kinds; Jant is lowest. More high are Sash, who can be without benefactors, but cannot be benefactors to others. More high are Tane, who can have things and be benefactors but cannot own...place? Ground? More high are Tosk, who can own a place, and most high are Ta-lakh who are authorities.” 

From the way Vӧsh was describing it, Gyli Prime was absolutely  _ feudal _ .

“English doesn’t categorize that way,” I said. “Would it bother you, in English, to be called by ‘he/him/his’ pronouns? Because, um, I’ve kind of been calling you by them from the start, and kept doing it even when introducing you to my friends just now, which I shouldn’t have done before talking to you about pronouns. I’m sorry.”

“Are they the correct pronouns, in English?” he asked, seeming puzzled. 

“I think we don’t share enough language to really talk about this the way it deserves to be talked about,” I said. “You aren’t eating.”

“You are not eating. It would be rude to eat before you eat,” he countered.

I wondered if that was a caste-specific thing, or if it was a social role thing, or if it was just a basic courtesy thing in his culture. I wasn’t about to get into it. I skewered a slice of venison on my fork and followed it with a cube of squash, popping both into my mouth. 

Vӧsh followed suit, and I watched his eyes dilate as he made a long, purring moan at the back of his throat. 

So, venison and winter squash were a win, then. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fact: the product Jendri specializes in is basically a fusion between https://foragerchef.com/maple-sugar-venison-bacon/ and https://www.jamon.com/curing.html


	10. Vösh

I had never, in my entire life, been presented with food that was as delicious as the food in front of me right now. Even at the monastery, which was the first place I’d ever had the chance to eat actual fruit or vegetables, the food had been nothing like this. It was in an absolutely separate category of being from the printed food that I’d eaten for most of my life. I’d been entirely satisfied with the kibble - this was _ transcendent _ . This was the kind of food that Ta-lakhs hired Tosks and Tanes to make for them. It wasn’t the kind of food that a Jant would have even been allowed to prepare, on Gyli, much less actually eat.

Gray kept casually talking, between bites, and it was an act of will for me to keep pace with them… him. He’d just told me that the correct English pronoun was ‘him’. Learning English was obviously going to become one of my top priorities if I was going to make myself useful among humans. 

“If you and I will be space-sharing companions, there are things we should each know about the other to have us live comfortably,” Gray was saying. “How does time, where you are from?”

“I don’t understand the question you’re asking?” I said.

“On the human homeworld, a day is broken twenty-four times. On the tevsa homeworld, a day is broken forty-eight times. On the Adri homeworld a day is broken thirty-six times. Because this is, in the hub a cycle of twelve parts is maintained. I mostly operate on human time, because the biosphere mimics our homeworld, earth,”

“I understand the parts of time,” I said, doing a bit of quick math in my head. “But I still don’t understand your question.”

“Well, for me, most days I wake between the sixth and seventh hour following midnight. I like to be asleep for about eight hours at a time, when I sleep. When I wake, I like to eat a small meal, then spend several hours gathering data in the biosphere, then have another meal. After that, I like to spend a two of hours talking to friends and sending messages to my family of origin, then a two of hours reviewing data from the biosphere in times that I am not there - mostly the things that happen in dark hours when I am asleep. I spend another two or three hours doing different things after that - being with friends again or consuming entertainment or going for another walk in the biosphere. I most often go to sleep between the tenth and eleventh hour after day-middle. My question is, how do  _ you _ most enjoy to arrange time? I observe that you have most often been already awake when I end my sleep.”

“I don’t think I have a preference? I can adapt to whatever’s most easy for you,” I said, still not entirely certain that I understood the question he was asking. As my benefactor, he was the one who ought to dictate how my time was best spent, what work I’d be put to and when. The question made little sense. “I’ve been living as a trespasser for one hundred and eighty-four Kuot days on the Kuot colony ship, hiding in wall spaces and cargo holds. I didn’t keep a regular schedule for any of the time I was a fugitive, really. When I was a prisoner, we did everything by audio tones synchronized to our collars - there was a tone that meant ‘attempt to sleep’ and a tone that meant ‘prepare for work’ and a tone that meant ‘report to the hygiene suite’ and a tone that meant ‘you are behind quota’. There was no way to see outside, and the lights were always on, so telling time was impossible. When I can sleep uninterrupted, it’s usually for about six hours at a time, the way I’ve observed ‘hours’ here.”

“It sounds like you’ve had a very bad time,” Gray said.

“I’m alive,” I said, feeling my whiskers draw back. “It’s more than some can say.”

“That is a worthwhile point,” Gray said. “But you are here now, you can choose how to arrange your time. Wake and sleep when you choose, eat when you choose, do work that you choose, when you choose to do it. What do you enjoy to do? What makes you happy?”

I had to ponder that for a few moments, because ‘happy’ wasn’t really a concept that applied to Jants. Jants were either useful or useless. I must have taken too long to answer, because Gray said,

“What did you like to do when you were a child?”

“When I was a child, I was a playmate to my benefactor’s children. They determined what games we would play,” I said. “I was still very young when my benefactor grew tired of my bearer and gifted jant to another household, but the children liked having me around so I wasn’t gifted along with jant. There was some talk when I was very young of being trained as a consort, like my bearer, but as I got older it became clear that I wasn’t going to be beautiful. All talk of me being trained stopped when I presented with anatomy to sire but not anatomy to bear.”

“That answer is for a question different than the one I intended to ask,” Gray said. “I think that I misunderstand and misspeak. What was the most enjoyed time of your life?”

“I enjoyed my time at the monastery,” I said quickly, because that was a much simpler question.

“What did you do there?” Gray asked. “What about it did you enjoy?”

“I did a lot of different things in my time there; I tended gardens and cooked food, helped Jants from the sore learn to read-”   


“What’s ‘the sore’?” Gray interrupted. “It’s translating as ‘infected wound’”

“The sore was the part of the city I lived in where the poor lived - Jants without benefactors, Sashes and Tanes without jobs, that kind of people. Most cities have a sore, except lavish Ta-lakh cities that can relocate their poor to elsewhere.”

“I think I understand,” Gray said. “In English we call that a ‘slum’.”

I tucked the word away in my mind for future reference.

“Is there a slum of this station?” I asked. If Gray at some point decided that I wasn’t useful enough to keep, it would be important to know what part of the station I’d be able to sink into.

“No, we have no poorness here,” Gray said. “I think it will not translate well, but the way we create and use resources… everyone is given what they need? No one is without food and shelter and medical care.”

I wasn’t entirely sure that I believed that, though Gray did seem sincere in claiming it. He continued, 

“Part of being a citizen of this station is understanding the shared culture of this station and agreeing to be part of it and act to uphold it. I can explain better when we share more language. Getting back to why you enjoyed the monastery?”

“I enjoyed my time at the monastery because… because I was useful to jant people. Before that I had been useful to Tosk people, and it was a very different feeling… it’s hard to explain.”

“It was work that you want to do, not work that was given to you,” Gray offered. I considered that for a moment and said, 

“I was never truly a believer in Jaska - the deity our monastery was devoted to. Most of us weren’t, I think. Jaska is the benefactor of dispossessed Jants. Becoming a supplicant of Jaska is one of the ways a Jant can leave a benefactor without becoming willfully unsponsored.”

“What does it mean, ‘willfully unsponsored’, in this context?” Gray asked.

“If a person - a Tane or a Tosk or a Ta-lakh - offers to be a benefactor to a Jant, and the Jant refuses, that Jant is not merely unsponsored but  _ willfully _ unsponsored. If the spurned benefactor chooses to report the Jant as such, the Jant will be located by authorities and imprisoned - forced to be useful. It’s very bad to refuse a benefactor who makes an offer, if you’re a jant. To become a supplicant of Jaska, or of any other deity that will have you, is a lawful means of rejecting the sponsorship of a person.”

“Is that how you joined the monastery?” Gray asked.

“...Yes,” I said with some hesitation. “I’ve always been a criminal. I stole myself for the first time when I was fourteen years old. My benefactor formally gave me to tosks oldest child when tosk left home to attend an academy. Tosk very quickly gave me to a classmate to gain ta-lakh’s favor, and ta-lakh was….unkind to me. I stole myself one night and fled to the nearest sore. By the time my new benefactor realized what I’d done and had contacted the authorities about it, I’d been sworn to Jaska.”

“What would have happened if authorities found you before you were sworn to Jaska?” Gray asked.

“If I’d been caught without a new benefactor, I’d have been taken back to my benefactor and made to choose between repenting and hoping that my benefactor would have me again, or being declared willfully unsponsored and imprisoned for it. Much of what we did in secret at the monastery was to help unsponsored jants who were afraid of becoming willfully unsponsored - we knew a lot of Tane and Tosk households that would take supplicants, and we helped Jants to cross the border into Vilten if they wanted that. In Vilten they make no distinction between unsponsored jants and willfully unsponsored ones. It was very unlawful to help Jants cross into Vilten.”

“I understand,” Gray said, though I didn’t think he did. “I’m glad for you, that you were able to leave a bad situation for a better one. If you’re finished eating, I think that by now Sadge will be done with making your robe.”

I looked down at my plate and realized that it was entirely empty and had been for some time. I dipped my head in agreement and followed Gray as he showed me where to put the plate and cutlery I’d eaten from, explaining that a machine would wash it and return it to the correct storage place. The kind of thing that a Jant would be doing, back on Gyli. 

It was becoming more and more clear to me that this place didn’t  _ have _ Jants. 

What use could there possibly be for me here, when I was no longer an interesting novelty for Gray?


	11. Gray

Vӧsh was subdued in his reactions, but he seemed pleased with the garments Sadge had made; a sort of draped tunic with a slouchy cowl neck, solid fabric in a darker shade of blue than the bodysuit. The real art piece was the second garment, a kind of cape or cowl with a deep v-neck, closed at the front with chunky wooden statement buttons, that had pockets at the sides big enough to comfortably hold a tablet. It was made of hand-woven art fabric in shades of blue, green, and yellow.

The colors really brought out the green-gold of Vӧsh’s eyes, and the neckline’s drape emphasized just how long and slender his neck was - graceful as a deer.

“So when are you gonna let me dress  _ you _ ?” Sadge said, looking me up and down with obvious disapproval. Except for my jacket and boots, everything I was wearing was standard issue printed clothing, entirely robot produced. Brown canvas cargo pants, black cotton sleeveless t-shirt. What I wore basically every day, unless I had a decent reason to dress up.

“You know fashion’s not my thing,” I said, smiling. “But thanks for Vӧsh’s clothes.” 

“Like I said before, both of you come back when your boy here’s got more English, I did a whole lot of this flying blind regarding what he’s actually all about with clothes. He seemed to just agree with anything I suggested. Is that a politeness thing in his culture, do you think?”

“It’s complicated,” I said, not willing to tell Vӧsh’s story for him. He’d retreated back to monosyllabic responses in Sadge’s presence, which seemed weird because he’d been talking in sentences the whole time we’d been eating lunch.

We bid Sadge goodbye and I started walking back toward the human quarter out of habit. Usually, in the afternoon, I’d beck checking in with Vherka - but if I was any good at reading him, Vӧsh was all the way done with social interaction for now. 

“What would you like to do now,” I asked him, once we were out of commerce’s noise bubble. He looked up at me with a kind of dull panic, like he was afraid to give the wrong answer.

“We could go back to quarters and relax for a while, if you want, or take a walk in the biosphere-”

“I enjoy the outside,” he said, quickly, glancing over his shoulder. Yeah, definitely time to get him away from people and action for a bit. If he’d spent the last six months hiding in crawl spaces to avoid arrest or execution, he had good reason to be paranoid about crowds.

“Want to see the beach, this time?” I asked.

“I think it is not translating correctly, ‘beach’,” he said uncertainly. “It implies a large body of water.”

“Yeah, no, that’s correct,” I said. “On the outermost edge of the biosphere relative to the hub, there’s a body of water that mimics a shallow bay. It’s important to the water cycle in the biosphere; the bay is saltwater, fed by a brackish marsh that eases into a freshwater marsh. We even simulate tides by raising and lowering the water level on a cycle. 

“The city where I lived on Gyli Prime, when I was in the monastery, it had an ocean coast. The open market was on a cliff of rocks above a place where a river went into the ocean…”

“An estuary,” I offered.

“Yes, I think. How much space is the biosphere? All of it?” he asked, sounding bewildered.

“It’s a sphere one hundred kilometers in diameter, but most of it occurs on a plane that crosses the widest point,” I said. “There are a lot of different entry points - you and I have only entered through a few of them. Would you like to see the beach?”

“I think yes,” he said, still sounding uncertain, “If that is permissible.”

“It’s  _ so _ permissible,” I said, smiling, tossing my head in the direction of the biosphere.

I tried, badly, to explain the evacuated tube system that transited under the biosphere and had potential entry points every five kilometers or so. Vӧsh didn’t say a whole lot of anything, and I didn’t push him. 

It was cooler at the beach than it was on the forest trails I’d been focusing on for the past couple of weeks; I didn’t precisely have a circuit of what places in the biosphere I visited when, but I did tend to cycle through environments broadly and focus on one microbiome at a time, unless the drones and censors alerted me that something needed attention. Salt air hit me as we stepped out of the lift, and I had the abrupt homesick pang that I always had at the beach. I’d have to call home later and catch up. It was getting close to corn-harvesting time.

The beach access point was on a rocky outcrop among sand dunes, and it emitted an infrasound hum to discourage sea birds from nesting too close. From the access point, I could see the beach curving away in both directions - rocky at either end, then mudflats and cattail beds, then sandy in the middle. There were a couple of groups of beachgoers camped out on the sandy part of the beach; the nearest was a woman sitting on a blanket, reading from a tablet, glancing up now and again at a couple of kids running back and forth along the surfline. I knew the family, but couldn’t remember names just now… I decided to take us in the other direction. Avoiding social interaction was kind of the point of this exercise. 

Vӧsh made no objections.

Vӧsh was just looking absolutely and totally  _ awestruck _ by the beach.

“I’m going to check environmental specs while I’m here,” I said. “Feel free to take a look around. If you lose track of where you are, you can message me with your tablet. It can also direct you to the nearest exit point, if you want to head back to quarters before I do.”

And also I could track him by the data seed in his collar. The collar that he wanted to keep wearing. We’d have to have another conversation about that sometime soon because it was seriously weirding me out. If he was all about wearing a collar at all it could at least be something he picked out for himself, something that didn’t have a tracking device in it. 

I sat myself down on a flattish rock and pulled up the drone interface application on my tablet, checking in on data from the web of sensors across the shoreline biome. Bluefish, cod, and tautog stocks were looking good, which painted a good picture of bay health overall since they were the top predators in the biome here. I glanced back up at Vӧsh, who was standing at the shoreline, gazing out across the water. The widest part of the bay was about five kilometers across, tapering away in both directions, and optical illusion made it look like it really did extend into a wider ocean without the need for holographic projections. He kept referring to the biosphere as ‘outside’ and I couldn’t really fault him. 

Vӧsh would probably get around to wanting quarters of his own once he knew more English and made more friends on the station; given the summary of his life that he’d told me, he had every reason to be terrified and clingy regarding any semblance of stability and safety. I’d blithely accepted him as an animal and treated him accordingly for four days; I at least owed him continued support while he found his feet here. He’d probably benefit from talk therapy, but there weren’t any other members of his species on board and cross-species therapy was notoriously more miss than hit.

We were stuck with each other until we could work out a comprehensible translation of the citizenship application paperwork for the station, anyway. He couldn’t get quarters of his own, or access to a lot of the station infrastructure, without being a citizen.

I hadn’t had a room mate since my undergrad studies on earth, and I’d never had a roommate who wasn’t human - you had to specifically request that, unless you were in specific sociology programs, because roommates of different species had more frequent living conflicts than roommates of the same species. Usually from the nonhuman end, because humans were kind of insufferable but also had a penchant for packbonding and pairbonding with  _ literally anything _ . The human tendency to packbond with animals and even inanimate objects was a whole field of sociological study among adri.

I hadn’t talked to any of my four undergrad roommates since graduation. That probably said something unfortunate about me and my social skills as a human.

Maybe I’d call Goose later and see what she was upto; she was doing undergrad on earth just like I had, except she was in Tel Aviv studying AI systems. She might have relevant roommate advice for me.

Vӧsh came back from the shore line and sat down next to me; closer than generally polite proximity. I had to quash the impulse to ruffle his hair, reorient my mind around the fact that he was a person and practically a stranger. But he was also a person from a culture I hadn’t encountered at all, and he didn’t seem even remotely weirded out by all the casual intimacy I’d treated him with in the last four days. Maybe casual touch was a big thing in his culture. I should have just  _ asked _ about it, but that felt awkward as hell. Talking about social norms led to all kinds of race and class and gender pitfalls, and we didn’t share enough language to be sure of fluid translation.

And I had a stupid amount of social anxiety. 

So we just sat there together in what I hoped was companionable silence, me checking up on weather data and water parameters, him staring at the bay, until it started to get dark.


	12. Vösh

When we returned to quarters, Gray requisitioned a bedroom for me.

It was  _ baffling _ to me that Gray could and would request another entire room in his quarters. A room specifically for me, with no other function than to be my personal dwelling space. It was created by the removal of modular walls, converting what had been storage space into dwelling space. The ‘price’ of the space was to help relocate the goods that were being stored there - loading boxes onto a maglev cart and unloading them into a different storage cell. It took less than half an hour, and Gray did most of the work because he had the physical strength to do so and I didn’t.

“The standard quarters in the human place are built to have as many as four bedrooms around a shared space for cooking and eating and resting and hygiene,” Gray explained as he emptied the storage cell. “People who prefer to live alone are able to give away space that is not needed to public use - storage spaces, crafting places, gardens, art making places. No one is bothered by the taking of this space.”

“You’ve preferred to live alone,” I said, not quite a question.

“Most times, yes,” Gray said. “When I was younger and did study on Earth I lived with others, and I lived in a household with my progenitors and sibling as a child. I prefer to have an alone space to be quiet with myself in. So much of my work is walking alone quietly in the forest. I prefer to only have to be with people when I choose.” 

Which meant that I was, by virtue of being his indefinite guest, an imposition. He’d chosen to share his space with an animal, not a person.

“I’ll try not to bother you,” I said. Gray answered with a quizzical look, but I couldn’t think of what else to say.

The room he’d created was made to human proportions. It was an absurd amount of space to quarter a single nakt, particularly a jant. It was bigger than the room that my first benefactor’s children had shared when they were small. The conversation we’d had about furnishings had practically been an interrogation, him pressing me for details about seating and bedding, showing me things that could be readily produced by large matter printers nearby. He insisted that things produced by matter printers incurred no cost at all to him, that only things made of specific effort by people required barter and trade and favor to procure. 

I hadn’t had a hammock since the raid on the monastery; the prison-factory had only provided flat platforms with a thin layer of padding. I hadn’t realized how utterly, basally wrong it had felt to sleep exposed until I had the opportunity to sleep suspended in a cocoon of soft fabric. I curled up in it and cried, quietly, for hours. I couldn’t have said why I was crying, just that I felt _ too much _ . I slept better that night than I had in years. I had dreams of Dymӧr. 

I couldn’t decide if the dreams were good or bad, only that they hurt.

For the next ten days, I spent the majority of my waking hours studying the English language with and immersive language-learning program on the tablet I used. At first, Gray had arranged social situations with other humans. I didn’t feel particularly equipped to be among other humans, and often fell silent in my anxiety. Gray didn’t punish me for it; he just stopped arranging such situations. It was...confusing. He was my benefactor, and I was his supplicant. There was no reason for him to be so solicitous toward me. I didn’t even have  _ duties _ , for fuck’s sake, aside from seeing to the laundering of my own clothing and bedding - which only involved putting the articles into a machine and taking them out later. 

The days fell into a pattern; I typically woke before Gray did, and would stay in my hammock, studying English with my tablet. Eventually Gray would emerge from his room and prepare himself a meal, knocking on the door of my room to ask if I wanted to join him. I knew, ostensibly, that I was allowed to use the matter printer - or anything else in the kitchen - to make food for myself. It still felt wrong to do it, like there would be some hidden punishment or consequence if I chose the wrong thing to print or printed too much of something... waiting for Gray to be eating before I ate felt less like stealing. He usually made something called ‘hominy’ in English and ‘nausamp’ in Mishánnock, a kind of porridge made of boiled seeds that wasn’t terribly different from the porridge we’d eaten at the monastery. What  _ was _ different was ‘maple syrup’, a kind of tree sap that was very sweet and complexly aromatic. I had never in my life been as well fed as I was as Gray’s supplicant. I didn’t have a chance to get actually  _ hungry _ between new offerings of absurdly lavish food.

Following the morning meal, I’d generally accompany Gray in his travels around the earth biosphere, which usually led to protracted vocabulary lessons in both English and Mishánnock. The languages were very different from one another, and Gray was often able to ramble about the etymologies and histories of certain words, about how Mishánnock was a reconstructed language, blended from several different but closely related languages of the indigenous people from the part of the earth that his ancestors were from - which was the same part of earth that the biosphere emulated.

I’d join Gray for his midday meal at the marketplace, which varied wildly from day to day. It seemed to have a constantly changing selection of foods made by different vendors. I always ate what was put in front of me and did it gladly, but Gray was quick to interrogate me about my preferences, what I liked and disliked and why. Such meals also often involved social meetings with Gray’s friends and acquaintances, people who would join our table and share the meal with us, trying to engage me in conversation that demanded use of my very imperfect English. I was generally exhausted by the end of it, and hugely grateful to be allowed to retreat to ‘my’ room while Gray reviewed data from the biosphere’s network of sensors and vid feeds.

He’d eventually seek me out to tell me about his plans regarding an evening meal - preparing food or venturing out to commerce or visiting a friend’s quarters. He always invited me to join him, and it took several days for me to muster the confidence to decline, just to see how he’d react. His reaction was hardly a reaction at all. He wished me a good evening and left. I pressed my luck and used the printer to make a portion of one of his presets, something called ‘Thai Noodles’. Even printed food here was of a quality superior to anything I’d had back on Gyli Prime. 

Gray actually  _ praised me _ for having used the kitchen printer, when he returned. It was frankly embarrassing how much I enjoyed the praise. How much I cared about him being pleased with me.

How much I wanted him to ruffle his hands in my mane and pet my neck and shoulders and say soothing nonsense at me, like he had when he’d thought I was an animal. 

On the evening of the fifteenth day after Gray had bought me from the pirates, Gray returned from his social activities, collapsed carelessly onto the sofa, and asked,

“Do you like table games?”

“I’m...not sure what you mean?” I said back, in English.

“I talked to my sister earlier in the week - she’s on earth now - and she wants to meet you. She and I and a few other people have arranged to jointly play a table game called Settlement. It’s cooperative, players against situations, and mostly about resource management. We’d be casting, not meeting in person. I was hoping that you’d join us for the game. It wouldn’t be for another week; getting all our schedules to line up across different time zones is hard. I could teach you how to play it.”

“You haven’t talked before about your sibling,” I said, without really thinking about it. It wasn’t the answer to the question he’d implied. He’d mentioned having one, in passing, but the idea that this sibling would want to meet me was a revelation… I hadn’t really considered that Gray was talking about me to other people.

“Oh, yeah, I suppose I haven’t talked about family in general, have I?” He said. “My sister’s name is Goose - Fiercegoose Jennings. She’s four years younger than me, attending studies on earth. She’ll probably move back to Mishánnock after graduation. I haven’t seen any of my family in person since last Strawberry Thanksgiving. I’m planning to visit again for Nikkomo - a winter holiday a couple of months from now. Would you be interested in joining me?”

“I’ll go wherever you’d like me to go,” I said instantly, because it was the only correct answer for a jant to give a benefactor. Turning the idea over in my mind, I didn’t really object… nothing that Gray had said about Mishánnock sounded particularly daunting. He gave me another of those quizzical looks, the ones that meant he was calculating something about me in his brain. 

“Do you have any siblings?” He asked.

“Not that I know of,” I answered. “My bearer was given to a new benefactor when I was still very young, and I suppose jant might have gone on to have other children. It’s also likely that my first benefactor was my sire, making me part-sibling to tosk’s children.”

“What determines caste, on Gyli Prime?” Gray asked. “If you have the same sire as your benefactor’s children, why are you jant and they’re tosk?”

“A child is the caste of their bearer, regardless of sire,” I said. “My bearer might have sired other children - jant was a consort, after all - but those children would be the caste of their bearers.”

“Is it common that Nakt people can both bear and sire?”

“Most common, yes. When a jant presents with incomplete anatomy, like I did, it’s… bad luck? It happens to one or two of a dozen children. Never to tosks or ta-lakhs, because they can bring their children to doctors before presenting age to be tested and treated if they’re not in balance. The followers of the deity Anzith can only be bearers who cannot sire, for complicated religious reasons. Presenting without bearing organs is more unlucky than presenting without siring organs, but both conditions are out of balance - they can’t ever be part of a perfect union.”

“What’s a perfect union?” Gray asked.

“Two nakt people of the same caste who take vows to form a household, to sire and bear one another’s children.”

He nodded and said,

“Among humans it’s more common to be able to either sire or bear, very uncommon to be able to do both without medical intervention. Reproductive role, maleness and femaleness, are a big part of gender. I can, theoretically, sire - not that I’ve ever actually tried to. I definitely can’t bear, and the idea doesn’t hold any appeal to me. When you talk about ‘presenting’ - for Nakh people, is reproductive anatomy not evident at birth?”

“No,” I said, feeling slightly repelled at the notion of an infant with reproductive anatomy. “Reproductive anatomy doesn’t grow until a nakh person is between a dozen and a dozen-and-a-half years old.”

“A lot of conflicts on earth across many different cultures probably could have been avoided if that was true of humans,” Gray said with a huff of laughter. “I was born with anatomy that indicated a probability that I’d grow up to sire, and also I’m male. This is common. It’s less common for a child to be a different gender than the one that their anatomy would seem to indicate, and different human cultures have different ways of addressing it. Many human cultures have addressed it in ways that have caused a lot of suffering.”

“That sounds unfortunate. You talk a lot about different human cultures; how many are there?” I asked. 

“Too many to count, and they’re always changing and growing and splitting and fuzing… humans are complicated. Every non-human species that knows about us has strong opinions, and most think we’re at least a little insane. But circling back, do you want to learn how to play Settlement? It can be played with just two players, though games with more players are usually more interesting.”

“If you want to teach me, I want to learn,” I said. That led to Gray pulling the low table close to the seating area, turning on its surface and configuring it to display the game board and ‘cards’, and explaining the basic premise and rules of play. 

The fictional settlement Gray and I built was resilient against three different ‘trials’ posed by the game, which was a ‘win’ condition for all players. 

“The smaller the number of players, the harder it is to win, and this is your first time playing!” Gray said, grinning. “We make a good team.”

That praise glowed warming in my mind for the rest of the night. 


	13. Gray

Game night was over better than I’d expected - maybe it was the casting, or the distraction of having an objective, or a combination of everything - but Vӧsh seemed relaxed in a way that he just hadn’t any of the times I’d taken him out to commerce or to friends’ places. Doubly surprising that he was relaxed because Goose could be… a lot.

Vherka had ended up ducking out when she learned that we’d be playing Settlement, because she wasn’t really one for co-op games. Aside from Vӧsh and I, the party consisted of Goose, Tessa - lead wolf behavioralist in the biosphere and dedicated tank, and Sido’o - a tevsa anthropology student who I’d invited partly because he always played healer and partly because he added another nonhuman to the party. I was playing infrastructure, Vӧsh was playing tech, so it made a pretty balanced party overall. 

Goose, as expected, was directing the action in game and conversation out of game. She’d been a task delegator from the age of five or so. 

“Ok, for this coming round, Tessa and I are going to do an out-party toward the derelict ship for salvage, Sido’o is going to work on a vaccine, and Gray and Vosh are going to try and repair the environmental seals on the second pod so we can get the hydroponics bay up and running. Out-party’s probably going to need healing when we come back, so you should keep that on deck for the round after next if you can, Sido’o. Everyone cool with this attack plan?”

“I know the second pod is important for food in future rounds, but we have enough rations for three more rounds - I think it’s more important that Gray and I work on upgrading the medical pod, in the short term, so Sido’o can be more effective when you two are injured on your out missions,” Vӧsh said, quietly. His gaze was fixed on the board, not on the social screens, and there was visible tension in his neck. But he was actually offering a viewpoint, and damned if I wasn’t going to back him up on that.

“Hard second,” I said. “Vӧsh is right, we still don’t know which hazard suite we’re going to be dealing with all game but getting the medical pod its first set of upgrades is super important in the early game no matter what, and there’s still a chance that you might find food resources either on the derelict or in the environment.” 

I looked at Goose, trying to communicate that this was something she should roll with. She glanced at Vӧsh, who was still doggedly looking down at the board, and shrugged.

“Yeah that works too, if no one else objects,” she said with a smile. I watched her icon move to the exit bay, then it was Tessa’s turn. She looked to Vӧsh and asked, “So, Vӧsh, how old are you in a species-relative way? Also in a chronological way, but that’s usually less important, far as I’ve figured from all the nonhumans I’ve ever talked to.”

“I’m not sure that I understand the question?” Vӧsh asked, glancing to me and then back down, his ears going back.

“Well, like me and Gray - we’re both technically adults, in a social sense - but he’s four years ahead of me, in an actual adult career. He’s clearly an adultier adult than me. I’m still studying full time; haven’t decided yet how long I’ll keep at it. Studying on earth gets weird after you show BA proficiency because they still do capitalism on earth - but that’s a whole other thing. When I say life stages I mean... Ok, so, for humans it goes childhood, adolescence, early adulthood - growing into an adult person and figuring out who you are as a person. Then you get to  _ actual _ adulthood, where you work on a career or two or three, and maybe have one or more life partners, and maybe have kids, you know? Or with Tevsa they’ve got that whole party-boy stage before they become matrons-”

“Rude,” Sido’o said, his chromatophores coloring pink and orange in amusement. “We’re not  _ all _ party boys, some of us are insufferable nerds who spend our evenings playing cooperative board games with aliens and totally not strategically gathering data for a dissertation on the nature of cross-species social bonding in humans.”

“Uh-huh,” Goose said, looking at him sideways, “And how many humans have you had sex with in the name of your xenoanthropolgy research?”

Sido’o’s whole face went purple, all the way to blue along what I objectively knew were not actually cheekbones because tevsa didn’t have bones at all. I gave Goose a  _ look _ . She answered with a snort of laughter.

“I rest my case, party boy,” she said. 

“Have  _ you _ had sex with non-human people, Human Goose?” Sido’o countered, the purple fading back to pink.

“For the sake of my poor, poor brother, I refuse to go into detail,” she said with a toothy grin, “but the answer isn’t no.” 

Which was about what I’d expected. She was going to be twenty-two this spring and she’d spent the better part of the last four years on earth. On a university campus. An even more liberal and cosmopolitan one than I’d gone to, when I’d studied on earth.

Still, I didn’t particularly want to think about my kid sister’s sexploration phase.

“Am I the only one at this table who  _ hasn’t _ tried xeno?” Tessa said, make an exaggerated suspect expression at everyone.

“Didn’t you get married at, like, fifteen?” I asked. “How’re Patience and Merit and the kids doing, by the way?”

“I’ll have you know that I was twenty-one when I officially had a sixteen-year-old girl assigned to me, as was my sacred duty as the oldest son of the family blah blah blah,” Tessa said, rolling her eyes. “Patience is still on sabbatical at Gezzre-khat-tao station for the next couple of weeks, and they only send out subspace transmissions every other day because they're running on a weird thirty-two hour day there, but as of yesterday she’s doing good. She keeps sending pictures of sand beetles and I keep saying ‘nice’ because they all look alike to me. Merit’s taking a break from psych mediation to Dad full time while Patience is away. Zenith is talking about want to go off-station for their next course of study but Patience thinks they’re too young, and Very is currently hyperfocusing hard on a game where the goal is to genetically manipulate a colony of virtual bats-”

“Chiropterix,” I supplied. “Remind me to give you my handle and number before you go, Very and I can compare colonies.”

“I should have known you’d be all about that game,” Tessa said.

“Wait a sec, back up to the whole  _ child marriage _ thing?” Goose asked, looking boggled.

“Oh, Gray hasn’t told you my harrowing backstory?” Tessa asked, glancing at me as if for confirmation. I shrugged; it hadn’t been my story to tell. She looked back to Goose. “I grew up on a crazy Christian cult station! My parents had me clocked as ‘Eldest Son’ and  _ ding-dong they were wrong _ . Merit was my next farm neighbor and childhood best friend - and also I had a devastating crush on him but didn’t know how to even about that. He and Patience were in crazy stupid teenage love, but that wasn’t allowed because Merit is the fifth son in his family and the cult declared that marrying out of birth order was just  _ not on _ . So Patience and I were married, and we waited until the hot second Merit turned eighteen to all cut and run together. We did the post-cult therapy thing on Horizon station, just off Mars - they’ve got a whole program there of other people who’ve left Dominion, spent a couple of years there. We all shifted from trauma bonding to actual bonding while we found ourselves. I shucked off the identity assigned by my parents and became Quintessence. Sent a subspace message to my parents about it, but never got anything back - didn’t expect to. We’re all officially excommunicated, and our families aren’t allowed to contact us, because we’re apostates. It’s all  _ very _ dramatic.”

Sido’o’s chromatophores were rippling subtle patterns of red and brown; he was absolutely taking notes. Goose and Tessa hit a combat encounter they’d hit during their out-mission and shifted their focus, and there was a lull in the conversation for a minute before Vӧsh said, very quietly,

“I haven’t had sex with anyone who wasn’t nakt.” 

“Lack of interest, or lack of opportunity, or cultural taboo?” Sido’o asked, brightening. “What are the attitudes towards xenosexuality among your people?” 

“It depends on caste, and probably is different in other nations than mine,” he said, scratching the back of his neck, his ears now firmly flattened against his skull. “I was never in a position to meet with aliens in any serious way. The nation I come from, Akrash, we are very insular. Very traditional and religious. On Gyli, our off-planet contacts are mostly kuot people and tsevsi people. They’re the same species as tevsa, I think, but long-colonized, a very different culture than the tevsa people I’ve seen here.”

“Our people have been traveling space and colonizing new worlds for three thousand years,” Sido’o said. “Twelve hundred years ago a massive gamma ray burst destroyed one of our jump networks and subspace communication hubs. We’re  _ still _ finding diasporic colonies, sometimes they don’t even remember the homeworld. If we pulled up a galaxy map, could you find your planet on it, do you think? If these ‘tsevsi’ are unknown to the confederation, they will wish to make contact.”

“I’m sorry, but I never had much opportunity to learn galactic geography. I know that the kuot ship I stowed away on was going to the outer rim to begin a new colony, but when it was taken by the pirates… I know we made at least two different subspace jumps, but I don’t know from or to where.”

“That’s sad, but wholly understandable,” Sido’o said. “But my question remains, regarding xenosexuality. My studies have shown me that humans are, as a species, utterly omnisexual. Individuals and cultures differ, of course, but-”

“But humans have been making porn about nonhumans since before first contact,” Tessa said.

“Humans have been making porn about nonhumans, re: gods and monsters and animals, since at least the paleolithic period,” Goose said. “We are, as a species, exceptionally slutty and exceptionally horny.”

Sido’o went purple again, and turned the subject back to the game because Tessa and Goose’s characters had returned from their out-mission and needed healing.

“I think we lost track of where this conversation started,” Goose said. “I was asking Vӧsh about life stage stuff.”

“If I’ve done my math right,” Vӧsh said, cautiously, “Then by Terran timekeeping I’m between twenty-eight and twenty-nine years old. I’ve been adult, by nakt reckoning, since I was fourteen. Jant become adult much younger than other castes - almost as soon as we present, really.”

“Present?” Goose asked.

“Puberty,” I said, giving Vӧsh an out in case he didn’t feel like talking about his species’ reproductive biology. 

“Gotcha,” Goose said, nodding. “Gray explained in our last comm that your career back on Gyli was some kind of activist for your caste, yeah? That you helped people emigrate to escape your nation’s regime?”

“It was one of the ways we helped,” Vӧsh answered, sounding cagey. “We also took in orphan children and offered meals to the unsponsored and helped people find sponsorship if they wanted it. The border-crossing is what made the authorities raid us, why so many were arrested and killed. I heard that the temple was burned down and that a lot of the sore was scoured, but I wasn’t there for that. I was imprisoned.”

“You must have so much fortitude, to have lived through all of that,” Goose said. Vӧsh ducked his head, looking mildly embarrassed.

I flipped the second trial card on my turn, and we had to deal with an EMP frying all of our electronics, and that got everyone’s attention back on the game. I had a feeling that Vӧsh and I were gonna have a heavy conversation after the game ended and everyone stopped casting.


	14. Vösh

The gathering we’d had was unquestionably the best interaction I’d had with humans other than Gray so far; we’d collectively won the game, and I hadn’t fucked up my English past the point of comprehensibility even once. 

The others stopped casting shortly after the game concluded, but Goose and Gray continued talking together for a time. Neither of them admonished me when I retreated to the kitchen under the pretense of putting together food. The matter printer could create nutritionally complete meals that I thought were delicious, but Gray insisted that ‘real’ food was superior. He typically used the printer to generate raw materials and prepared them in a traditional way. 

I’d worked in the kitchens at my first benefactor’s home, but I’d only done basic preparatory and cleaning tasks. The cook had been a tane of significant years, strict and orderly. Tane wouldn’t allow jants to handle delicate or expensive ingredients. At the monastery, my kitchen skills meant that I’d been in high demand in our outreach kitchen - but we’d only had simple ingredients to work with, mostly things that came from our own gardens. Sometimes merchants would tithe produce and spices to us that were past their best. The goal at the monastery had always been to stretch everything as far as possible, because there’d always been more hungry mouths than food to fill them. 

Gray’s kitchen was… different. He had a frankly astounding array of flavorful and aromatic things to add to food, which he broadly categorized as ‘herbs and spices’. He’d told me that I was welcome to experiment with anything and everything in his collection of spices, but gave me a list of things that were particularly volatile chemically that were often toxic or at least irritating to nonhumans.

I’d spent the entirety of a couple of afternoons cataloging them, learning their names, reading encyclopedia entries about their origins and uses, smelling and tasting them. That was how I learned that ‘pumpkin spice’, and specifically its constituent ‘nutmeg’ was mildly and very pleasantly intoxicating.

I set about putting together a recipe from Gray’s collection - ‘pumpkin spiced caramel corn’. He’d introduced me to ‘popcorn’ very shortly after my confession of personhood, and I’d been studying its potential since. It was, perhaps, a bit obsessive. 

I put a pinch of nutmeg under my tongue and stood there breathing the scent of it from the jar for a minute, letting it relax me. I needed to be relaxed if I was going to have the courage to start the conversation I wanted to start with Gray. I returned to the living room carrying an excessively large bowl of popcorn to find that Goose had stopped casting and Gray was sitting on the sofa, scrolling through visual entertainment options on the large screen set into the wall. 

“I was thinking of winding down with a documentary or two, unless there’s anything in particular you wanted to watch,” he said as I moved to join him.

I placed the popcorn between us, as if it were a placating sacrifice, and steeled myself before daring to ask a question that I’d been avoiding for two weeks because I didn’t want to ruin everything.

“Why don’t you touch me like you did when you thought I was an animal?”

“What?” Gray asked, sitting up straighter, all of his attention turning away from the screen and toward me.

“When you thought I was an animal, there was a lot of casual touching - you would often pet my head and neck and shoulders, touch me behind my ears, run your fingers through my mane. You stopped when you learned that I’m a person. Why?”

He didn’t answer me, but countered with a question,

“What does casual contact look like, in your culture? I mean… the way strangers are socially allowed to touch vs. friends vs. family members vs. sexual partners? What did it mean to you, culturally and personally, that I was getting so handsy all the time?”

“I didn’t mind it, if you’re worried about that,” I said, smiling and shaking my head. “It’s… I’ve been watching the way you touch and don’t touch others. When you introduced me to human Natalie and her child in the biosphere - you only touched hands with Natalie, but you stroked the child’s hair, picked it up and spun it around. The child laughed and ran away to join a group of other children. I want to understand.”

Gray sighed deeply, leaning back against the sofa.

“Ok so… this is one of those cultural context things that’s hard to explain, I guess. Nat gardens in the biosphere, and she was one of the first people I met when I first came to the station. We’re good friends - almost extended family. The word that Andrade called me, ‘uncle’, literally means ‘a parent’s male sibling’. Nat and I aren’t actually siblings, but that’s the kind of relationship we have. It would be totally inappropriate for me to touch a kid that’s a stranger unless there was an immediate danger or a medical emergency or something, but kids that are family-adjacent….  _ augh _ , this is hard. Ok. So. This isn’t exactly codified but the difference between casual contact has a lot to do with social potential, I think? Touching animals and children is utterly nonsexual unless the person doing the touching has a serious mental illness and needs treatment. Same with casual family contact. It’s not flirting if I hug my sister or help her brain her hair. But if I offered to braid the hair of somebody not related to me, that would be flirtatious - an expression of romantic or sexual intent. Pretty much any physical contact an adult human has with another adult human outside their family ends up on the flirtation spectrum, to a greater or lesser extent. There’s a lot of social intuition and nonverbal communication about the whole thing. Depends on existent relationship and eye contact and facial expression and social context and all of that. If I tap a stranger on the shoulder to tell them they’ve dropped something, that has a very different social implication than if I put my hand on someone’s shoulder when we’ve been talking over drinks. They’re reaction indicates a lot, too.”

I took a handful of popcorn and slowly ate it, one piece at a time, looking at the wall screen and not at Gray. I took a deep breath before I asked,

“Did you stop touching me when you knew that I was a person because you worried that I could have construed as an expression of romantic or sexual interest?”

Gray loosed a miserable-sounding groan, dragging his hands down his face.

“Yeah, let’s go with that as the deeper subconscious reason for the social phenomenon of it not being ok to touch strangers, I guess.” 

I knew that the nutmeg was affecting me, because under normal circumstances I’d never have had the raw temerity to ask,

“ _ Do _ you have romantic or sexual interest in me, Gray?”

He met my gaze for a fleeting moment before looking away again. He stalled with the same trick I’d stalled with - eating some popcorn and taking a sip of the drink he had set on the table. 

“I honestly don’t know,” he said after a long while. “There’s potential, I guess. We’ve only known each other for a couple of weeks, and I don’t want to presume anything but… I like you? Like, as a person. As a roommate. As a friend. I’m not in any kind of a hurry to see you move on, and I’m probably going to be at least a little bit emotionally fucked up when you eventually want your own quarters, because I’ve definitely already formed an attachment. That’s a known quantity with me, getting way too emotionally involved way too fast-”

“I like you,” I said, interrupting him. “I know you’ve preferred to live alone-”

“It’s not even that I prefer to live alone, I’m just shit at working out close social relationships is all,” he interrupted, sounding frustrated. “I’m clingy, and I ramble about boring shit that no one cares about or else don’t talk at all, and I’m really dense about basic social cues. All the romantic relationships I’ve ever had have blown up spectacularly. It’s one of the reasons I chose a career off Mishánnock - had a childhood friend who turned into a teenage romantic partner who turned into a pissed-off ex. We can get along civilly, now, but it’s… uncomfortable. Heard from Goose that he got married this year to another of my childhood friends so  _ that’s _ going to be a thing when we see one another at Nikkomo. I wanted to do forest management anyway, and Mishánnock’s got more forest people than it knows what to do with, so I just kind of didn’t go back after university studies. It’s pretty rare for folks to leave Mishánnock in any kind of long-term way unless you specifically go into cultural outreach work, or super spiritual types who move back to Earth to be one with the home-place and all that. I left because things are weird for me there. Now I try to keep things casual, because I’m good at casual. It’s when things go beyond casual that I fuck everything up.”

That seemed to be a very sore point, something we could have another discussion about later, when we weren’t traversing the complex ground of potential for relationship escalation. I had another handful of popcorn and confessed,

“I haven’t had a lot of experience with romantic relationships. I’ve loved before. A sash, Dymӧr, another of the supplicants to Jaska. A revolutionary, always pushing the rest of us to do more, to be more. Sash’d been tithed to the monastery as an infant, knew everything there was to know. I don’t know what sash saw in me, why sash picked me… we were together for most of ten terran years. Sash was executed after the raid.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.

“You remind me of sash,” I said. “They way you talk about the things that make you excited… when we’re in the biosphere and you’re telling me about chains of interaction between organisms. I think the two of you would have gotten along, if you’d ever met.”

“I’m gonna presume that’s high praise,” he said. “Should I ask if there’s potential on your side? Romantic interest?”

“There might be,” I said. “I’d have to do some research on the intranet and learn more about human anatomy, I think. Like I said during the game, I’ve never had sex with anyone who wasn’t a nakt. The idea isn’t repellant, though. I’m curious. I wouldn’t mind you touching me again, either, the way you did before - it was reassuring, soothing. Made me feel safe. I think I’d do better in social situations if you’d pet me every so often so I know things are alright.” 

He let out a chuff of laughter and said,

“Your turn to talk about social touching customs among your people, then.”

I had to think about that for a minute, frowning. 

“For us, it’s about caste… no one would hesitate to touch a jant if they felt inclined to, unless that jant’s benefactor had specifically forbidden it. But it’s very directional… a ta-lakh can choose to take a jant consort, or kick a jant out of their way on the street, but no jant would ever dare to touch a ta-lakh’s hand or shoulder the way I’ve seen you touch other humans. Touching someone of a higher caste without their express order is a god way of getting jant’s hands cut off.”

“I know it’s impolite to say, but your planet - or at least your country - sounds like it’s fucking horrible,” Gray said.

“For some people more than others,” I said. “Ta-lakhs seldom have anything at all to do with jants; they’re mostly served by tosks and tanes. Even when a ta-lakh is benefactor to many jants on ta-lakh’s estate, they usually rely on servants of higher castes to manage them. I only ever interacted with one ta-lakh, and that… ended poorly. After I stole myself and became a supplicant of Jaska, I was mostly among jants and sashes. It was the happiest time of my life, being among people who were equal or near equal to me. That ended poorly too.”

There was silence for a long while after that, then Gray said,

“Well… for what it’s worth I hope that this chapter of your life doesn’t end badly. If you’re curious about human anatomy there are totally some documentaries I can recommend, including ones that detail the evolutionary history of how our bodies ended up like this - janky knees and s-curve spine and all. We’re basically very heavily jerry-rigged fish.”

“Probably less specific than the kind of research I was planning to do, but I’m not opposed to that,” I said. “I don’t know much about the evolutionary history of nakt people. It was against the law in Akrash to disseminate blasphemies. We had a number of forbidden books in a secret part of the monastery, but none of them were about evolutionary history. It would be interesting to learn about the topic in general.”

Gray let out another chuff of laughter, turning his attention to navigating the list of available programs on the screen. 

All in all, the conversation seemed to have gone well. 


End file.
